I nodded agreement. I’d treated half a dozen fractures due to falls on ice-glazed streets that winter, and had no wish to spend the next six weeks or so encased in splints and bandages. “Here’s the Squire Grill. They have good steaks, if you’d care to try—”
“Morbleu, I would attack a dead raw horse without seasoning!” he interjected. “My friend, it is that I am hungry like a lady-wolf with sixteen pups.”
The Squire Grill was warm and cozy. Windsor chairs of dark oak were drawn up to the tables, shaded lamplight fell on red-checked tablecloths, behind the bar a man in a white jacket polished glasses and at the far end of the room there blazed an open fire quite large enough to have burnt a Mediæval heretic.
“Une eau-de-vie, pour l’amour de Dieu,” de Grandin told the waitress, then as she looked blank, “A brandy, if you please, and bring her with the speed of an antelope, Mademoiselle.”
The girl gave him a friendly smile—women always smiled at Jules de Grandin—then, to me, “And yours, sir?”
“Oh, an old fashioned without too much fruit, if you please, then two steaks, medium, French fries, lettuce and tomato salad—”
“And mugs of beer and apple tart and copious pots of coffee, s’il vous plaît,” the little Frenchman completed the order.
The look of pleased anticipation on his face became an expression of ecstasy as he cut into his steak, black as charcoal on the outside, and pale watermelon pink within. He raised his eyes and seemed to contemplate some vision of supernal joy. “Ah,” he murmured, “Ah, mon Dieu—”
The door swung open and a blast of frigid air came rowdying in, and with it came a party of young folks, healthy, obviously ravenously hungry, riotous with gaiety. They made a noisy entrance, moved with more than necessary noise to the long table set before the fireplace, and began calling loudly for service. Evidently they were expected, for a waitress hurried up with a tray of Martinis, and was back with another before the first round was finished.
A young man who had plainly had more than a modest quantum of pot-valiency already, rose and held his glass up. “Lad-eez: an’ gen’men,” he announced a bit unsteadily, “to—to th’ bride’n groom; may all their troubles be little ones, an’—”
“Hold on, there, Freddy, hold it!” warned a blonde girl whose pink cheeks glowed with something more than the cold. “They aren’t married yet—”
The young man seemed to take this under advisement. “U’m,” he drew his hand across his face. “Tha’s so, they ain’t. Very well, then: Lad-eez an’ gen’men, les fiancés. May they live long an’ prosper!”
“Speech! Speech!” the youngsters chorused, pounding on the table with their cutlery. “You tell ’em, Scotty!”
A tall young man in a crew cut, tweed jacket and tan slacks rose in response to the demand. He was a good-looking youngster, blond, high-colored, with a casual not-long-out-of-college look that labeled him a junior executive in some advertising agency or slickpaper magazine’s editorial staff. “My friends,” he began, but:
“The ring, Scott—put your brand on her!” his tablemates clamored. “Stand up, Bina, it won’t hurt—much!”
The laughing girl who rose in response to the summons was small and delicate and looked as if she had been molded in fragile, daintily tinted porcelain. Her nose and brow and chin were aquiline but delicately proportioned, her skin exquisite. Framed by hair of almost startling blackness that fell to her shoulders and was cut across the forehead in straight bangs, her face had the look of one of those stylized pictures of a Renaissance saint. Coupled with the blush that washed up her pale cheeks her smile gave her a look of almost pious embarrassment. Demurely as a nun about to take the veil of a bride at her wedding ceremony, she held out a slim, fragile hand and the young man slipped a heavy ring on its third finger.
“Seal the bargain! Seal the bargain!” the demand rose like a rhythmed chant, and in obedience to it the girl lifted her face for his kiss. The flush deepened in her checks, and she sat down quickly as two waitresses came up with trays of steaming food and in their wake the cellérier with an ice bucket and a magnum of champagne.
De Grandin grinned delightedly at me above the rim of his beer mug. “C’est très joli, n’est-ce-pas?” he asked. “Dites, youth is marvelous, my friend; it is a pity that it must be wasted on those too young to appreciate it. If—”
A shout came from the merrymakers’ table. “Look at Bina! She’s passing out!”
I glanced across the room. The girl on whose hand we had seen the ring placed had fallen back in her chair, but the look on her face was not one of alcoholic stupor. Her scarlet lipstick—the sole makeup on her face—seemed suddenly to stand out, vivid as a fresh wound, as if what little color she possessed had retreated behind it, changing the whole aspect of her countenance. Her lips hung open slackly, tried to move and failed, and in her eyes was a look of fascination such as might have been there if she saw a viper crawling toward her. “That girl’s ill!” I exclaimed.
“Pardieu, my friend, you are so right!” de Grandin agreed. “C’est—”
The girl rose slowly, like one who makes as little noise as possible before she takes to panic flight, and walked toward the door of the restaurant. Her patellar reflexes seemed to weaken as she stepped; her knees flexed and her feet kicked aimlessly, as if she suffered motor ataxia. Then suddenly her knees buckled and her legs twisted under her. She fell as limply, as flaccidly, as a filled sack from which the grain had run out, or a rag doll emptied of its sawdust. We saw the shape of total fear form on her face as we reached her. She turned wide, frightened eyes on us, and I noted that although her pupils were large and black they were rimmed by dark green irises. “My legs,” she whimpered in a voice that seemed to shake with chill. “I can’t move them—there’s no feeling in them; but they’re cold. Cold!”
“I am Dr. Jules de Grandin, this is Dr. Samuel Trowbridge,” the little Frenchman introduced us as we knelt beside the fallen girl. Then, “You have no pain, Mademoiselle? No feeling of—”
“No feeling in my legs at all, sir. They’re numb—and cold.”
“U’m?” he raised the hem of her full, pleated brown wool-jersey dress and took the calf of one slim leg between his thumb and forefinger. “You do not feel?” he pinched the firm flesh till it showed white with pressure.
“No, sir.”
I noted that she wore no stockings and shook my head in disapproval.
De Grandin nodded. “Cold,” he pronounced. “Froid comme une grenouille.”
“No wonder,” I shot back. “You’d be cold as a frog, too, if you went traipsing out in sub-freezing weather with no more stockings than a—”
“Ah bah,” he cut me off. “Do not let Madame Grundy sway your judgment, Friend Trowbridge. It may be cold outside, but it is warm in here, and she sat almost within arm’s length of that great fire. She should not have the chill.”
I knelt beside him and laid a hand on the girl’s leg. It was cold as a dead woman’s, though the skin was smooth and sleek, without a sign of goose-flesh.
“You’re sure you have no pain, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin asked again, leaning close to look into her eyes and nostrils. “No headache, no pains in back or sides or limbs—”
“No, sir. Nothing, till just now when my legs gave way under me.”
He took his clinical thermometer from his waistcoat, shook it and thrust it into her mouth, then placed his fingers on her wrist. At length. “Pulse and temperature are normal,” he reported. “ It is not anterior polio-myelitis. Except for this localized chill and inability to walk—”
“Berger’s paresthesia?” I hazarded.
He nodded doubtfully. “Perhaps. At any rate, she cannot lie here. Let us take her home and see what we can do.”
JOBINA HOUSTON LIVED IN one of those cubicles known as “efficiency apartments”—a single fairly large room with furnishings designed to lead a double life. The small round dining table could be made into a bench by tilting up its top, a minus
cule kitchenette, complete with porcelain sink and electric grill, lay in ambush behind a mirrored door the divan opened out to form a bed, the chest of drawers did duty both as china closet and clothes press.
With the help of the blonde girl who had been ringleader at the party we got our patient into bed with hot water bottles at her feet and an electric pad under her.
De Grandin looked more puzzled than alarmed. “When did you first begin to notice this sensation of numbness, Mademoiselle?” he asked when we had made the girl as comfortable as possible.
She wrinkled her smooth brow. “I—I don’t quite know,” she answered. “It must have been—oh, no, that’s silly!”
“Permit me to be judge of silliness and sense, if you please,” he returned. “When was it that you first began to feel this chilly numbness?”
“We-ell, I think I first felt it just as Scott put the ring on my finger. You see,” she hurried on, as if an autobiographical sketch would help us, “Scott Driggs and I both work at Bartlett, Babson, Butler and Breckenridge’s advertising agency. He’s in copy, I’m in production.”
“Of course,” he agreed as if he understood her perfectly. “And then, if you please?”
“Well, we sort of drifted together, and—and suddenly we both realized this is it, and so decided to get married, and—” One hand crept from the shrouding blankets as she spoke, and began to smooth the bedclothes gently. “So tonight we gave an engagement party, and—”
“Mademoiselle, where did that ring come from, if you please?” he interrupted.
“Why, from Scott of course. He gave it to me tonight—”
“Bien oui, one understands all that, but what I most desire to know is where did he get it—where did it come from originally?”
“Why, I really don’t know, sir. Scott and I don’t really know much about each other. All we know is we’re in love—that’s plenty, isn’t it?”
He nodded, but I noticed that his eyes were on the ring with a long, speculative stare. “You do not know who was his father?” he asked at length.
“Not really, sir. I understand he was some sort of scientist, an explorer or something; but he’s been dead a long time. Scott hasn’t any family. He finished college on his G.I. money and came to work at B.B.B.&B. about the same time I did. So, as I said, our work threw us together, and we—”
A small frown of annoyance gathered between de Grandin’s brows as he stared in fascination at the ring. It was a heavy golden circlet, heavy as a man’s seal ring, and set with some sort of green stone which might have been peridot or zircon, or even a ceramic cartouche. Certainly it could not have been more than semi-precious, for it had no luster, although its color was peculiarly lovely. The gem was deeply incised with what appeared to be a human figure swathed like an Egyptian mummy, but having a peculiarly malformed head. “You recognize him?” he asked as I completed my inspection. I shook my head. To the best of my knowledge I had never seen such a figure before.
“Tell me, Mademoiselle,” he demanded, “just what did you mean when you said you began to feel this so strange numbness at the moment your fiancé put this ring on your hand?”
“I don’t quite know how to put it, sir, but I’ll try. Scott had just put the ring on my finger when the dinner came, and as I took the cover off my coq au vin I happened to look toward the fireplace and saw—” she halted with a little shudder of revulsion.
“Yeah, what was it you saw?” he prompted.
“A cat.”
“A cat? Grand Dieu des porcs, you mean a puss? Why not? Most restaurants have one.”
“Ye-es, sir; I know. That’s why I chose the Squire Grill for our party. They haven’t one.”
He raised his slim black brows. “Qu’est-ce que c’est, Mademoiselle?”
“You see, I’m one of those people who can’t abide the sight of a cat. It terrifies me just to have one in the same room with me. There’s a technical name for it. I forget—
“Ailurophobia,” he supplied. “Bien, my little, you are one of those who cannot stand the sight of a puss-cat. What next?”
“At first I thought I must have been mistaken, but there it was, coming right at me, snarling, and getting bigger with each step it took. When I first saw it, it was just an ordinary-sized cat, but by the time it had advanced three feet it was big as a large dog, and by the time it almost reached the table it seemed big as a lion.”
“U’m? That is what terrified you?”
“Oh, you noticed how frightened I was?”
“But naturally. And then?”
“Then I began to feel all funny inside—as if everything had come loose, you know—and at the same time I felt my feet growing numb and cold, then my ankles, then my legs. I knew that if I didn’t get away that awful thing would pounce on me as if I were a mouse, so I got up and started for the door, and then—” Her narrow shoulders moved in the suggestion of a shrug. “That’s where you came in, sir.”
He tweaked the needle points of his small blond mustache. “One sees.” Turning to the girl who had come with us from the restaurant, he asked, “Will you be kind enough to stay with her tonight? She has sustained a shock, but seems to be progressing well. I do not think that you will need do more than keep her covered, but if by any chance you should need us—” He scribbled our phone number on a card and handed it to her.
“O.K., sir,” the girl answered. “I’ll ring you if I need you, but I don’t expect I shall.”
“THE TROUBLE WITH TODAY’S young folks is that they don’t know how to drink,” I complained as we left Jobina’s apartment. “That gang of kids had been pub crawling—stopping at every bar between their office and the Squire, probably—and Jobina thought she had to match Scott glass for glass. No wonder she thought she saw a monstrous cat. The only wonder is she didn’t see a pink elephant or crocodile.”
De Grandin chuckled. “La, la, to hear you talk one might suspect you wear long underwear and drive a horse instead of a car, Friend Trowbridge. I fear, however”—he sobered abruptly—“that her trouble stems from something more than too much gaieté—”
“D’ye mean to tell me that you think she saw that great cat?” I demanded.
“I think perhaps she did,” he answered levelly.
“Nobody else did—”
“Notwithstanding that, it is entirely possible she saw what she claimed—”
“Humph, when people see things that aren’t there—”
“Perhaps it was there, spiritually, if not corporeally.”
“Spiritually? What the devil—”
“Something not so far from that, my old,” he agreed. “Suppose we call on young Driggs. He may be able to tell us something.”
I expelled a long, annoyed breath. When he was in one of these secretive moods it was useless to question him, I knew from experience.
“How’s Bina?” young Driggs greeted as he let us into his apartment something like a quarter-hour later.
“She seems recovering,” the Frenchman answered non-committally. “Meanwhile—”
“What was it? What was wrong with her?”
“One cannot say with certainty at this time. Perhaps you can enlighten us.”
“I?”
“Précisément. You can, by example, tell us something of the history of the ring you put upon her finger just before her seizure.”
The young man looked at him blankly. “I don’t see what connection there could be between the ring and Bina’s illness.”
“Neither do I?” de Grandin confessed, “but if there is, what you can tell us may prove helpful. Where did it come from, if you know?”
“It belonged to my father, Dad was assistant curator of Egyptology at the Adelphi Museum in Brooklyn.”
“Ah?” de Grandin bent a little forward in his chair. “It may be you can help us, after all, Monsieur. What of your father, if you please?”
“In 1898 or ’99 the Museum sent him to Egypt, and while there he went up the Nile to Tel Basta, where—”
“Where the worship of Ubasti and Pasht, the cat-headed goddesses, was centered in the olden days,” de Grandin interjected.
“Just so, sir. While Dad was poking round the old ruins he unearthed several little balls of what seemed like amber, except that it was much clearer, almost transparent. The Egyptian government had begun to clamp down on the exportation of relics, but Dad managed to smuggle three of the small spheres out with him. Two he gave to the Museum, the other one be kept.
“That little amber ball is among my earliest recollections. I used to look at it in awe, for buried in it was a gold ring with a green set, and when you held it to the light the stone seemed almost alive, as if it were an eye—a big green cat’s eye—that looked at you.
“I don’t know much about Egyptian antiques, my tastes all ran to other things, but I remember Dad once told me the ring had once belonged to a priest of Bastet, the cat-headed goddess who personified the beneficent principle of fire.”
De Grandin nodded eagerly. “Quite yes Monsieur. And then?”
“My father died while I was still in the Army, and Mother left the old house in Gates Avenue and went to live with some cousins out at Patchogue, and when she died that little amber envelope containing the old priest’s ring was about all she left me.”
He grinned a little self-consciously. “Any man can give his girl a diamond—if he has the price—but nobody but I could give Jobina such a ring as that I put on her finger tonight.”
De Grandin tugged at his mustache until I feared that he would wrench it loose from his lip. “How did you get the ring from its envelope, Monsieur?” he asked.
“I had a jeweler cut it out. He had the devil of a time doing it, too. I’d always thought the capsule that enclosed it was amber, or perhaps resin, but it proved so hard that he broke several drills before he could succeed in cutting it away from the ring.”
The Frenchman rose and held out his hand. “Thank you, my friend,” he told our host. “I think that you have been most helpful.”
“You’re sure Jobina’ll be all right?” the young man asked.
Black Moon Page 70