The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3)

by André Couvreur

  “Come on! Look at me.”

  “That’s true…excuse me, Doctor. I bless the hazard that has put me in your presence.”

  To get close to Tornada without having to have one’s belly sliced open was a stroke of luck for a popular novelist. He hoped to obtain the seeds of some fantastic adventures from the infernal scientist, which would make him the equal of a Poe or a Wells.

  He had the discovery of the crime related to him, making notes in a notebook. He attempted to ask questions on other subjects with no relation to the present event, but Tornada avoided them, bringing him back exclusively to the object of his visit.

  “Was anyone seen to approach the Baron?”

  “Not so far as I know.”

  “On whom should my suspicion fall?”

  “No one.”

  “And what has been done with the weapon that was used?”

  “No weapon has been found.”

  “Strange. Might it not be suicide?” asked the Commissaire, glancing in the direction of Betty, the former film star, easily capable of having driven her husband to despair.

  “It was an admirable marriage.”

  “His business?”

  “Very prosperous.”

  “A banker, however...We know, personally, that a banker always has some advice for which to reproach himself...and as the Baron must be imbued with the customs of his native land, perhaps...”

  “He’s committed hara-kiri?”

  “Exactly!”

  Tornada twisted his beard—his fashion of smiling. “One doesn’t commit hara-kiri by stabbing oneself in the heart; one chooses the entrails. It’s less poetic, to be sure, but it’s the traditional method. Note that for your next masterpiece.”

  “What! You know...”

  “There aren’t many things I don’t know. But now, what are we going to do with the poor Baron. May we do with him as we wish, and take him up to the first floor?”

  “You may. I ask you, nevertheless, not to dress him for burial yet. There will be a sequel to my investigation.”

  “The autopsy?”

  “Medico-legal; indispensable.”

  “Could it not be carried out here?”

  “You must know, Monsieur, that all autopsies of that nature are carried out at the Morgue.”

  “I didn’t know, never having been murdered.”

  Fortunately for Betty, this macabre badinage was exchanged in low voices. Again the Commissaire attempted to ask questions independent of the affair but profitable to his literature. Sarcastically, Tornada avoided them.

  When the visitor and his retinue had gone, Betty returned to the necessity of moving the dead man up to his bedroom. There was only one flight of stairs intervening.

  “Have two of your men transport him in the seat,” Tornada proposed.

  “That wouldn’t be easy, Master. Judge the weight of that armchair.

  “A stretcher, then?”

  “Where will we find one at this hour? But wait—I have something better.”

  She went out in order to ask for Abrovici’s help. He was just outside the door. It even seemed to Tornada that he straightened up after having been looking through the keyhole—an excusable curiosity, in sum, given the servant’s attachment to his masters.

  The Baronne isolated herself with him momentarily in the corridor; she must have needed to give him orders necessitated by the circumstances. She soon brought him back. Without saying a word, with the calmness of a market-porter sure of his muscles, Abrovici took hold of the dead man, loaded him on to his shoulders, holding his arms knotted around his taurean neck, and headed for the stairs. The legs, not yet fixed by rigor mortis, swung loose. Tornada and Betty followed him. Having reached the Baron’s bed, the porter deposited him there with a shrug.

  Marie, the chambermaid had already disposed the candlesticks and laid out a frock-coat covered with decorations, but, that costume being prohibited by the imminent autopsy, they contented themselves with taking off his rice-cutter’s robe, covering him with a bed-sheet, and furnishing his hands with the crucifix of his second religion. What sadness and derision there was in that change of costume, before the spouse and the friend, still in disguise, and Abrovici, the only one clad as mortuary etiquette demanded. The Baron was rejoining his glorious ancestors in a funereal irony...

  The symbolic candles had only just been lit when Félix Vion was introduced. Having sent his auto back to the garage he had indeed gone home on foot. There, he had been told about the telephone call summoning him urgently. Thus alerted, he had only taken the time to get rid of his costume and had leapt into a taxi.

  Informed of what had happened by the concierge, he approached the remains of his associate. He meditated profoundly for a long time, occasionally wiping away a tear.

  “Will you permit me to keep vigil?” he asked Betty.

  “I won’t leave that pious duty to anyone else—not even you, Félix.”

  “In that case,” said Tornada, “there’s nothing further for us to do here. It’s nearly five o’clock already, and I’m operating this morning. We’ll go out together, Vion. Embrace the Baronne, and let’s go.”

  Tornada’s automobile, which he drove himself, was waiting outside. They got into it, huddling in their furs. The cold was biting.

  “Shall I drop you at home, old man?”

  “Please.”

  Tornada did not draw away immediately, however. The event that had ended the party so tragically, and the persistent excitation of the good wines, urged him to talk, and to pass from the matter in hand to general considerations, which became paradoxically serious.

  “In all things,” he said, “my observation of a humankind that disgusts me more and more, shows me that instinct is the only motive force of all our actions. Civilization can do nothing about it. And how many crimes are also committed in civilization’s name? It claims to confront nature, to make human renounce at a stroke the forces that dominate them, in sum, to listen to the voice of reason. But just look at creation! Everywhere, it shows us a ferocious struggle. Everything alive survives only by destruction. On the earth that our feet tread, behind the lianas of forests, in the depths of the waters, in the heights of the atmosphere, there is nothing but beings engaged in devouring one another.

  “My dog, the mildest and most obedient, is a ferocious hunter. My body provides a battlefield to microbes engaged in a merciless struggle. Matter itself, apparently so neutral, is, according to the latest physico-chemical discoveries, nothing but an agglomeration of atoms that spend eternity bombarding one another; and one may wonder whether, beyond scientific conception, those infinite small entities are themselves worlds populated by atoms more minuscule still, equally constrained to decimate one another. Elsewhere, in all the unknown regions of the immensity, in the azure of the heavens, among the stars, it is probable that the same necessity subsists, of extermination in order to continue to exist...”

  He lit a cigarette and continued: “Humans are, therefore, made only to submit to a fatality, and one has difficulty in taking the side of those who count on getting out of it by means of good sense. Preachers of mutual love, evokers of justice, purifiers of conscience, so many beautiful voices calling for universal fraternity—how one would like to be able to listen to them! But if iron were ever taken away, men would still find means of fighting one another. They only fight with cannons, aircraft and gases while awaiting other inventions due to the genius of the civilized. Redoubtable weapons are being prepared by perfidious intelligence, avid for gain, the domination of money. They fight as much with the weapons of the seven deadly sins…I have no need to cite them for you.

  “Even mysticism and the ideal, which postpone the comfort of souls to a future life, are merely manifestations of the evil force of instinct. We are all predators. Let’s take the case of the worthy Sasoitsu. There’s a banker who, within his profession, was as honest as you, Félix—which is no small compliment—a banker charitable to the point, I’m told, of wantin
g to confide a part of his fortune to the occidental cultivation of his former compatriots. Well, Sasoitsu was nonetheless, like you, merely a pillager of savings...”

  “You’re exaggerating, old Nada. Have you done too much honor to the extra-dry?”

  “In vino veritas, my friend. Drunk as I am, I can’t see either the motive for or the author of this murder. Yes, I’ve been torturing my meninges, racking my brain, but in vain...”

  Having concluded his diatribe under the influence of Bacchus, he drove off.

  Insouciant nature did not prevent a radiant sunlight from bursting forth on the morning of the crime. As soon as daylight appeared, the law swung into action. The public prosecutor assigned the case to the examining magistrate Monsieur de Clair, reputed for his professional conscientiousness and his skill in clarifying the most confusing histories. He could only be reproached for a certain obstinacy when he had a guilty party in his sights. He then abused the summoning of witnesses, interrogations, commissions of enquiry and police raids: a system that was not so bad, since he had ended up obtaining confessions by that means from criminals that appearances would have acquitted.

  A bachelor, he lived in a miserly fashion, without needs, entirely devoted to his mysticism, and sparing even in that. His only extravagance was hunting. There, he did not count the cartridges. He was said to be an expert sharpshooter, never missing the crucial shot. He was as proud of his cynegetic successes as the others. He confessed that he obtained as much pleasure from bringing down a partridge as sending an evildoer to have his head cut off by Monsieur de Paris. Human prey, the instinct of murder, Tornada would have diagnosed, on emerging from a copious supper.

  His physique corroborated his two passions: a stubborn forehead beneath carefully combed fair hair, dominating narrow eyes, the left one always half-closed as if he were aiming a gun, and a flared nose curved over lips that were always sucking little pieces of candy that he took from his waistcoat pocket.

  It was in that aspect that he impressed Baronne Sasoitsu favorably when he introduced himself, accompanied by a clerk, to the house in the Avenue de l’Alma to begin his investigation. Contrary to what she had hoped of her courage, the unfortunate Betty had been unable to keep vigil over her husband. Leaving that care to Marie, she had gone to nurture her distress beneath the embroidered sheets of her four-poster bed. She was still in bed at ten o’clock, when the internal telephone informed her of the magistrate’s arrival. She hastily put on a pajama suit and ordered that he be sent up.

  “Excuse me for receiving you here in this costume, Monsieur le Juge. Believe that if I had not been so distraught...”

  “I understand perfectly, Madame.”

  “My Tani! We understood one another so well! He was an elite heart! You’ll clarify this horror, won’t you? You’ll find the wretch who has stolen him from me?”

  “I’ll do my very best, Madame.”

  “Oh, thank you, thank you,” he said, squeezing his hands.

  The magistrate was so immediately conquered that he scarcely troubled her, only asking a few questions. What could she tell him, in any case? She did not know anything, could not give him any indication; she was exhausted.

  Monsieur de Clair advised her to go back to bed. He went back down to the library to interrogate the staff. Without a glance at the sumptuousness of the bindings accumulated there, he installed himself at a desk next to the armchair in which the Baron had died. He sat his clerk there too and reread the preliminary report of the Commissaire of Police. Then he summoned all the members of the staff in turn.

  Neither the two valets, nor the cook, nor the dish-washer, nor the Baron’s chauffeur, nor the three chambermaids could furnish the slightest information. All of them had been at work, all of them had been amazed when the news spread. No one had gone out. He would do better to question the waiters supplied by the restaurant, or the man who was in the cloakroom when the guests began to leave.

  “Who was in charge of the cloakroom, then?”

  “Madame la Baronne’s chauffeur.”

  Someone was sent to fetch Abrovici from the garage. He was servicing the large limousine, of which Betty would certainly have need later. He arrived in overalls, his hands covered with grease. He bowed with a humility that disposed the inquisitor in his favor.

  “You were in the cloakroom?”

  “It had been entrusted to me, Monsieur l’Inspecteur.”

  “I’m not an inspector; I’m the examining magistrate appointed by the court. Tell me: the cloakroom was exclusively situated in the vestibule, in the location I saw when I looked over installation?”

  “Exclusively, Monsieur le Juge.”

  “No garments were deposited in this room?”

  “No, because it was being used for the reception.”

  “From your post, did you see anyone going toward the Baron, passing through the hallway?”

  “No one.”

  “And you didn’t leave your post throughout the soirée?”

  “Only for five minutes, to go into the drawing room adjacent to the dining room, where the stage was, to watch the Japanese ballet from behind the audience.”

  “Five minutes?”

  “Let’s say ten—no more.”

  “That’s a short interval, even so,” reflected Monsieur de Clair. He sucked a piece of candy and continued: “And you were alone in the cloakroom?”

  “When the guests arrived, Marie, our principal chambermaid, assisted me. During the departure, I was alone.”

  Marie confirmed what Abrovici said.

  The magistrate got up in order to ascertain whether surveillance of the hall was possible from the cloakroom. Then he came to sit down again, convinced of it.

  “If I might tell you what I think…,” Abrovici ventured.

  “Go on.”

  “The blow could not have been struck by anyone coming from outside. The door of the house, as the concierge will tell you, was closed at the time.

  “Send in the concierge.”

  The concierge confirmed it.

  “Which makes one wonder,” Abrovici the suggested, “Whether it might have been one of the guests, who, taking advantage of the fact that everyone was watching the performance, left without being noticed and, going through the large drawing room, then empty, calmly introduced himself into the library.”

  “No, since, when the murder was committed, the door to the large drawing-room was locked from the inside.”

  “Why should it not have been him who locked it, and, having struck the blow, went out into the hall to rejoin the audience at the performance?”

  “At the exact moment when you were not in the cloakroom? That would be quite extraordinary...”

  “Of course…but it’s necessary to think of everything. It’s also possible that the murderer had intended to reopen the door to the large drawing room in order to return to the performance, but that, having looked out first to see whether I was still in the cloakroom, and not seeing me there, he recovered his coat and left, without being seen or recognized.”

  “Quite extraordinary…,” repeated the inquisitor. “I don’t need you any more, chauffeur.” Abrovici was already on his way out when he suddenly called him back. “One more thing. You gave numbered tickets to everyone. Have you recovered them all?”

  “I haven’t checked. Sometimes, people don’t give them back. Some of them help themselves.”

  “Who was the first person that presented himself when you resumed your post?”

  “Wait, Monsieur le Juge, while I try to remember...” Abrovici searched behind his squinting eyelids. “I don’t remember.”

  “It’s not of any great importance.”

  “I was busy at that moment with Monsieur Vion, Monsieur le Baron’s associate, who was returning a trinket that Madame la Baronne had lent him.”

  “So Monsieur Vion left the soirée before the end?”

  “Yes, he must have been as tired as Monsieur le Baron. He works very hard too.”

>   “Had you given him his coat?”

  “Perhaps…no; he’d taken it during my absence. It was only when he got outside that he realized that he’d forgotten something.”

  “And what did he bring back to you?”

  “A dagger.”

  “A dagger?”

  “Yes—to complete his disguise. An object of great value taken from Madame la Baronne’s panoply.”

  “Indeed! A dagger. What a curious coincidence!

  Abrovici understood what watch hatching in the magistrate’s mind. “Oh, Monsieur le Juge…whoever you like, but not Monsieur Félix!”

  “I’m not asking for your opinion. What have you done with the weapon?”

  “Sapristi! I forgot to put it back in the panoply, as Madame la Baronne had instructed me to do,”

  “Where is it?”

  “It must still be in the cloakroom where I left it.”

  “Let’s go see.”

  Monsieur de Clair returned swiftly to the vestibule. There he discovered, wrapped up in a pigeon-hole, the object that might be relevant to his enquiry. He put gloves on before taking hold of it, in order not to leave fingerprints on it. He took the blade out of the sheath and studied it at length.

  “A beautiful weapon, in fact...”

  He resheathed it and carried it carefully into the library. Afterwards, he sent everyone out, in order to stick strips of paper, labeling them appropriately, not only over the interstices of the door leading to the hallway but also the double battens of the door communicating with the large drawing room.

  “I’m placing the seals,” he declared. “No one must touch them.”

  “I’ll make sure of that, Monsieur le Juge,” Abrovici promised.

  The magistrate then had the book brought to him that the guests had signed to record their presence, and confided it to his clerk. Finally, he went out, rubbing his hands.

  Needless to say, the drama caused a sensation among a public passionate for adventures of that sort. The great notoriety of the Baron, known throughout the world, contributed further to the attraction of the mystery. The headlines in the midday and evening newspapers, and those of the following morning, resulted in sales as huge as those engendered by a great catastrophe. Reporters laid siege to the house in the Avenue de l’Alma, the domiciles of the guests, the embassy, and the Tokyo Bank, of whose directorial office Vion was now in sole charge. In clubs, salons and cafés no one was talking about anything but the inconceivable murder. Who had perpetrated it? Was there a monetary motive? The vengeance of some disposed client? Was it a crime of passion, perhaps? Abrovici, Marie and the other members of the staff could no longer go out without being pestered by stranger in search of copy.