The look he gave her was direct and level, but not at all censorious. “Tu parles, ma petite,” he agreed with a quick smile. “Here is something for your services to Jules de Grandin,” he pressed a roll of bills into her hand, “and here is something for yourself alone.” Taking her cheeks between his palms he bent her face back and kissed her upon the mouth.
“Gosh, Doc,” she gave him a look in which surprise and pleasure were mingled, “you ain’t such a cold number yourself. Why don’t—” she slurred her voice in imitation of Mae West—“why don’t you come up an’ see me some time?”
“Should I require the service of a brave and loyal woman again you may be sure that I shall call on you, Mademoiselle,” he answered with a friendly smile.
“Okay, Doc, be seein’ you in the pictures.” She gave him a nod of farewell and turned toward her house.
“Too bad,” I murmured as I watched her walk off slowly through the rain. “She has the makings of something fine—”
“Ah bah, my friend, you sentimentalize!” he chuckled. “Did not you hear her? She understands herself perfectly, and was most just in her estimate. None but a fool would try to make a silk purse of a sow’s ear, or force a different way of life on women such as that. It is her destiny to be a waster, so she will go through life a petty criminal, harried by the police, picked up on trifling charges, serving short terms in jail, then, as she put it so concisely, ‘returning to her alley.’ The pity is not that she is what she is, but that she was born in our time. In ancient Greece, or the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, or even in medieval Europe, there was a niche and place for such as she, a sort of honorable dishonor. Eh bien, they had more religion and less morals in those days, I damn think.”
He shrugged as only a Frenchman can when he wishes to disclaim responsibility. The fault was Fate’s, not his. And: “Hiji, thou species of an elephant,” he added, “have you forgotten we have other duties to perform? Come, let us be upon our errand. Allez vous promener!”
“Right you are, my diminutive frog-eatin’ friend,” agreed the Englishman. “Carry on.”
THE BIG OLD HOUSE in Albemarle Road looked gaunt and lonely. Built of gray stone with a wide porch across the front and sides, it had the jigsaw ornaments of the Victorian period set in the angles of its gables, and iron urns on high stone pedestals on its front lawn. Now, huddled in the fringe of evergreens planted almost at its foundations, it had the look of an old man who wraps his cloak about him and withdraws from life. Rain lashed against its windows, flattening on the pines, rain sluiced down its gutters, wind-driven rain washed across its porch floor like waves that sweep across the decks of a ship in a storm.
De Grandin seized the heavy iron knocker hanging on the solid Flemish oak front door and beat a devil’s tattoo with its ring. No answer came to his first summons, but at the third insistent drumming a glow showed in the fanlight above the door, and the heavy panel swung back a few inches. “Who is it?” came the challenge in a rather high-pitched voice.
The little Frenchman put his foot in the crack of the door before he replied: “Those who wish to talk with you about the memorial you erected to your son in the park, M’sieur.”
The exclamation answering him was almost like a squeak. The door swung nearly shut, then, wedged against his foot, came to a halt, and: “Hiji, my friend, I think I need your shoulder’s weight,” he told the big Englishman.
The door crashed back before the mighty push that Hiji gave it, and we were in the hallway of the old house. I looked around me with amazement. The place was a litter of bad taste. Heavy furniture of the kind fashionable in the “awful eighties” stood about the walls, bronze statuary worthy of the worst the cemeteries have to offer loomed on onyx pedestals, the pictures in their heavy gilt frames showed impossible landscapes. The only light in the room came from an old gas chandelier which, dripping colored prisms, hung from the center of the ceiling. There was a musty smell about the house, a taint of dried leather, of dust and mildewed fabrics. “Tudieu, my friends,” de Grandin remarked, “I damn think we have come into the Castle of Despair.”
He looked at the short, fat man in the flowered silk dressing gown, and: “You wish to tell us of that memorial, M’sieur?” he asked. “Or shall we tell you?”
“I—I don’t know what you mean!” the other stammered, and the little, thin, high-piping voice that came from that great mass of fat struck me as being nothing less than shocking.
Joseph Stoneman was not an impressive figure, but he was sinister. Despite his moon face and pot belly there was none of the traditional jollity of the fat man about him, and the little eyes that looked out from the folds of fat that framed them were absolutely terrible.
“Monsieur,” de Grandin’s voice was flat and leveL and he kept his sharp gaze on the fat face of the other, “since you will not tell us, let me tell you of that memorial. Six weeks ago it left its pedestal and walked by night through Tunnell Street. There it encountered Sally Jukes, and what it did to her was most unpleasant.
“A week later it waylaid Mae Mahoney, and when its work was done there was another case for the coroner. Then Lucy Ebbert met him as she walked the street, and—”
A quick and dreadful change came over Stoneman’s face. Gone was the childish, sullen, stupid look, gone the dullness from his eyes. His fat jaws quivered like the dewlaps of a hound that works its teeth, his little, puffy mouth began to twist convulsively. “Yes, yes!” he squeaked. “I know it; I sent him—I tracked them down like rats, the sluts that lured my poor boy to his ruin. One by one I tracked them down, and had them killed the way their gangster lovers killed him. All, all are gone, now—Jukes, Mahoney, Ebbert, Cook!”
“There you make the mistake, M’sieur. Mademoiselle Cook is very much alive, as we can testify, and your statue he is—pouf!—eliminated.”
“You lie,” the other told him. “You can’t hurt him. He’s proof against your bullets—”
“But not against my dynamite, M’sieur.”
“Dynamite?” the other echoed unbelievingly. “You dared to dynamite my lovely statue—my executioner?”
“Quite yes, M’sieur. Your statue is a heap of rubble, nothing more, and we are here to make you answer for your crimes.”
A sly, triumphant look came into Stoneman’s little eyes. “You can’t” he jeered. “Who’d believe the truth when you told it? What sober-minded jury would convict me on your testimony—or fail to send you to a madhouse?
“They’ll put you safely away, and I shall be free to impose my will on the world. I’ll recite the magic spell not once, but fifty or a hundred times. Think of it, I’ll have a company—a regiment—of marble executioners to do my bidding, and all who offend me shall meet death. I’ll wipe out alcohol and vice and sin, and I shall be the sole judge of what’s right and what is wrong. I shall be like God. I shall—”
“You shall be nothing at all, M’sieur,” de Grandin interrupted in a low, hard voice. “You are the only man alive who knows the secret spell of the magus to bring the dead, cold stone to life, and knowing that, you know too much for the good of mankind.
“Trowbridge, Costello,” he turned to us, “will you accommodate me by retiring to the porch for a moment? I shall not keep you waiting longer than our work requires.”
The Sergeant cast a meaning look at me, and, “Yis, sor,” he agreed. “It’ll be a pleasure, so it will.”
We closed the door behind us and turned up our collars to the storm. Costello drew me to an angle of the wall, “We don’t know nothin’, do we, Dr. Trowbridge, sor?” he asked softly.
It was not long before they joined us, locking the door carefully after them. “Hélas, I bring you the sad news, as the papers in the morning will report. Monsieur Joseph Stoneman, the eminent philanthropist, committed suicide tonight. It appears that he hanged himself with the belt of his dressing gown.”
Death’s Bookkeeper
JULES DE GRANDIN, LOOKING even more diminutive and dapper in his uniform of m
ajor in the Service des Rensiegments than in civilian attire, regarded the highly polished tip of his tan boot with every sign of approval as he exhaled two columns of smoke through narrow nostrils. Dinner had been something of a function that evening, for at a little place in East Fifty-Third Street he had found that afternoon a half-case of Nuits St. Georges which he had borne home triumphantly just in time to grace the capon which Nora McGinnis had been simmering in claret for our evening meal. Now, fed to repletion, with coffee on the stand at his elbow and something like a thimbleful of green Chartreuse left in the pousse café beside his cup, he seemed utterly at peace with all the world. “The day has been a trying one at the Bureau des Rensiegments, my friend,” he confided as he took a half-swallow of Chartreuse and followed it with a sip of black coffee. “I am tired like twenty dogs and half as many so small puppies. I would not budge from this chair if—”
The shrilling of the telephone sawed through his statement and with a nod of apology I picked up the instrument. “Yes?” I inquired.
“This is Michaelson, Doctor,” the woman’s voice came to me from the other end of the wire.
“Yes!” I repeated. Miss Michaelson was night supervisor of the maternity floor at Mercy Hospital, and when she called I knew what impended.
“Mrs. Morrissey in Fifty-Eight—”
“How long?” I interrupted.
“Not more than half an hour, sir. Maybe less. If I were in your place—”
“If you were in my place, I should be in yours, and not have to drive thirty blocks through zero weather,” I broke in somewhat rudely. “Have them make the delivery room ready, if you please, and give her half a grain of morphine if the pain becomes too great. I’m starting right away.”
To de Grandin I explained: “Just one of those things that keep life from becoming too dull for the doctor. The population of New Jersey is due for an addition in the next half hour, and I have to be there as part of the welcoming committee—”
“Will you permit that I go with you to assist?” he asked. “Me, I have so long been busily engaged in reducing the sum total of humanity that it will be a novelty to take part in its increase. Besides, my hand grows awkward for the lack of practice.”
“I’ll be delighted,” I assured him as I hunted up my case of instruments and got into my greatcoat. “But I thought you were too tired—”
“Ah bah!” The little laughter-wrinkles deepened at the outer corners of his eyes “That Jules de Grandin, he is what you call?—the cramper-in-the-stomach? He is always complaining, that one. You must not put too much credence in his lamentations.”
IT WAS AN ORDINARY case. Miranda Morrissey was young and strong, and de Grandin’s obstetrical skill was amazing. “So—now—my small sinner,” he spanked the small, red infant’s small, red posterior with a wet towel, “weep and wail, and breathe the breath of life in the process. What?” as the baby refused to respond to his command. “You will not? By blue, I say you shall! You are too young to defy your elders. Take that, petit diablotin!” He struck a second, sharper blow, and a piping, outraged wail answered the assault. “Ah, that is better—much better!” He wrapped the now-wriggling small, wrinkled bundle of humanity in a warmed turkish towel and bore it toward the bed where Miranda rested with all the pride of a cook carrying a chef-d’oeuvre. “Behold your man-child, mother,” he announced as he laid the baby on her bosom. “He is not happy now, but in your arms he will find happiness. Le bon Dieu grant the world in which he has been borh may be a better one than that into which we came!”
As we walked down the corridor he drew his hand across his eyes wearily. “There is something more solemn in a birth than a death,” he confided. “For the dead one all is over, his troubles are behind him, he is quits with life and fate. But for the one who is beginning life—hèlas, who can say what he has stepped into? A quarter-century ago when little boys came into the world we thought they were inheritors of peace and safety and security; that we had won the war to end all war. Today?” He spread his hands and raised his shoulders in the sort of shrug no one but a Frenchman can attain, “Who can prophesy, who can predict what—barbe d’un bouc vert, who in Satan’s name is that?” he broke off sharply.
I looked at him in amazement. His small, pointed chin was thrust forward and in his little round blue eyes there was the flash of sudden anger, while his delicate, slim nostrils twitched like those of a hound scenting danger or quarry. “Who? Where?” I asked.
“Yonder by the elevator, my friend. Do not you see him? Parbleu, if the Iscariot had descendants, I make no doubt that he is one of them!”
I looked where his glance indicated and gave a shrug of disgust. “That’s Coiquitt,” I answered. “Dr. Henri Coiquitt.”
“Hein?”
“I don’t know much about him, and the little that I do know is not good. He came here since you went away. You never heard of him.”
“Thank God for that,” he answered piously. “But something tells me I shall hear more of him in the future, and that he shall hear of Jules de Grandin.”
The object of our colloquy turned toward us as the elevator stopped in answer to his ring, and in the light that flowed from the car we saw him outlined clearly as an actor in a spotlight on a darkened stage. He was a big man, six feet tall, at least, and his height seemed greater because of his extreme slenderness. He was in black throughout, a long loose cape like a naval officer’s boat-cloak hung from his shoulders, his broad-brimmed hat was black velour; his clothes, too, seemed to be of a peculiar shade of black that caught and pocketed the light. The only highlight in his costume was the band of white that marked his collar above his wide, flowing black cravat, and in complement to the somberness of his attire his skin was pale olive and his lips intensely red. As we stepped into the car beside him we caught the scent of perfumed soap and bath powder, but underneath the more agreeable odor, it seemed to me, there was a faint, repulsive smell of decay and corruption.
Coiquitt bowed gracefully as we joined him, and de Grandin, not to be outdone in courtesy, returned the bow punctiliously, but for a moment, as their glances crossed, both men seemed poised and alert, like duelists who seek an opening in each others’ guards. I felt a shiver of something like awe run through me. It seemed to me as if I sat in a box seat and watched a drama staged by Fate unfold. These men had never heard of each other, never before set eyes on each other, yet in the glance of each there shone a sudden hatred, cold and deadly as a bared knife. They were like two chemicals that waited only for a catalyst to explode them.
Traveling so smoothly we were scarcely aware of its motion, the elevator drew to a stop at the ground floor, and Coiquitt stepped soundlessly across the corridor to the reception room. At the door Camilla Castevens rushed to meet him. “How is he, Doctor?” we heard her ask in a trembling whisper. “Is he—is there any improvement?”
He bowed to her with a superb gentility, yet the gesture had a hint of mockery in it, I thought. “Of course, Miss Castevens. Did I not promise you—” He turned and cast a glance half quizzical, half mocking, at de Grandin and me, and with a guilty start I realized we had halted almost at his elbow, drinking in each word he and Camilla said to each other.
“Good evening, Dr. Trowbridge,” Camilla nodded coldly as she recognized me, and with an answering bow I took de Grandin’s elbow and guided him toward the door, feeling like a naughty little boy who had been caught eavesdropping on his elders’ conversation.
“Now, what in Satan’s name is it all about?” the little Frenchman demanded as we stepped into the stinging cold of the February night.
I laughed without humor. “I wish I knew. Dr. Coiquitt is a newcomer to Harrisonville, as I told you. Where he came from goodness only knows. We know only that he had credentials from half a dozen European universities, and had no difficulty in obtaining a license to practice. Since he set up shop in Dahlonega Road he’s raised the very devil with the medical profession.”
“Ah? How is that, is he a quack?”
“I only wish I knew. He’s certainly not orthodox. The first case I have real knowledge of is one he took from Perry. I think you know Perry. First-rate heart man. He’d been treating Mrs. Delarue for angina pectoris, and having no more luck with her than was to be expected in the circumstances. Then somehow Delarue met Coiquitt and took the case from Perry. Within two months his wife was as completely cured as if she’d never had a moment’s illness. That started it. Case after case the rest of us had given up as hopeless was taken to Coiquitt, and in every instance he effected a complete cure, even with Bernice Stevens, who was so far gone with carcinoma hysteria that none of us would operate, because there wouldn’t have been enough left of her to bury when we’d cut the morbid growth away.
“U’m?” be pursed his lips. “I take it there is something more here than mere professional jealousy, my friend?”
I shook my head hopelessly. “Of course, there is. We’d have been chagrined to have a stranger take our cases and effect cures when we’d abandoned all hope, but that could have happened. Only—” I paused, at loss for words to continue, and he prompted softly. “Yes, only—”
“Well—oh, this sounds utterly absurd, I know—I’d never think of mentioning it to anybody else, but—hang it all, man, it seems to me there’s something like black magic in his cures.”
“Ah-ha? How do you say?”
“In every instance where a cure has been effected someone in the patient’s family has taken ill and died within a year. Sometimes sooner, but never later.”
He was silent for a moment, then, “Perhaps,” he admitted thoughtfully. “The Greeks knew of such things—”
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