“From which side did that individual enter the library?”
“I can’t say.”
“Did you see him leave?”
“No, for he closed the door. I assumed that it was to talk business more tranquilly, and was astonished that it was at such a time.”
“What you’ve told me is extremely interesting. Monsieur Vion was the only guest dressed in that fashion. Why have you waited until I questioned you to reveal this information?”
“I didn’t think that anyone would dare to suspect of banker of Monsieur Vion’s status.”
On her return the following day, Mademoiselle de Viseuil was equally affirmative. She even remembered a cordial gesture that the Baron had addressed to his visitor at a distance: his last gesture...”
The conviction that was growing within the magistrate’s cranium was further supported by the report of the municipal laboratory, after examining the dagger put under seal. If the weapon had been used, it must have been carefully cleaned, for no trace remained on it of any kind, either of blood or of fingerprints. Did not that particularity explain the premature exit of Vion and his return to hand Abrovici a clean implement?
The testament, opened immediately after the funeral, lent further support to the accusation. The Baron designated to succeed him as director of the bank, with all the pecuniary advantages that determined, his associate Félix Vion. That was, in a way, a fruitful inheritance, which, although it did not carry entitlements like those of the Baronne, ensured a considerable participation in the profits of a very prosperous business: a supplementary income of at least five hundred thousand francs a year, the notary estimated.
I’m on the right track! the magistrate said to himself.
So he decided, in spite of Professor Tornada’s prohibition, to go and interrogate Baron Sasoitsu’s collaborator at his bedside.
The arrival of the law found Félix Vion still suffering, but sufficiently recovered to have resumed work. Dressed in warm pajamas, he was studying a file that had been sent to him by Monsieur Dittelin, the deputy director of the Tokyo bank. He received Monsieur de Clair with the courtesy that every good citizen owes to a representative of justice.
As soon as the magistrate had left, however, the nature of the questions that he had been asked, and the insistence that had been put into them, disturbed him to such an extent that he did not hesitate to violate the recommendation of his friend Tornada to await his permission before going out. He dressed in a trice and left his apartment to go in search of the surgeon at his clinic in the Parc des Princes, in the confines of the Bois de Boulogne.
As he went past he concierge’s lodge he noticed the presence of a man in a cap who came out after him. In the street, from the opposite sidewalk, a gentleman hailed a taxi at the same time as him, in which the individual from the lodge joined him.
The two autos took the same route, going to the Auteuil quarter along the fortifications, and stopped not far from one another at the entrance to the surgeon’s property.
The clinic was enclosed by a high wall. One entered it via a porch giving access to the service facilities. They were followed by a carefully-tended park decorated with flower-beds, dotted with trees defoliated by the winter, with a pond on which water-lilies lay formant. In the background, among the branches, the slate roof of another building was visible: the laboratory, prohibited to the patients, where the scientist carried out mysterious research.
Félix Vion was received by a nurse. She told him that the Master, having finished operating sooner than usual that morning, must be doing his personal work. Familiar with the location, and intimate enough not to have to be announced, Vion went across the park and into the narrow path that led to the laboratory. As he did every time, he experienced an insurmountable apprehension at the thought of what was being elaborated there.
The place lent itself to that apprehension, by virtue of its massive door, the long oppressive corridor leading to the sorcerer’s den, and the incomprehensible material that was perceptible as soon as the threshold was crossed. There was a disorderly assemblage along a unique ledge of instruments adapted for the revelation of the life of infinitely small creatures, bottles filled with anatomical specimens, and tubes enslaving the forces of nature to human usage. Glazed windows spread an abundant cold light therein.
Vion went in without knocking. Anyone else but him would have thought that they were encountering a madman. What could be the significance of what the man whose long beard was overflowing his surgical smock, his head still covered by a skullcap, was doing, brandishing an extinct projector in one hand while the other was offering a peanut to a small marmoset standing on a stool surmounting a narrow platform beside a blank white screen? What sense, moreover, could be accorded to the speech that the experimenter was addressing to the little animal?
“My darling,” he said, “it’s just a matter of staying still for a minute; I’m asking no more of you than that. You’re going to think about your family, your brothers and sisters, the lianas of the forest where you were born, where you indulged in such amusing acrobatics. I don’t forbid you a few grimaces, mind. They’re the expression of what might be going on in your noggin. But don’t move, if you want to earn this nice reward. Have you got that? Right—don’t move again...”
As if it had understood, the marmoset became still on the stool. Tornada then produced complete darkness by drawing curtains over the window. He came back to the marmoset, directed his apparatus at it, level with the head, and pressed a switch that caused sheaves of electric spark to spring from it. At the same time, the screen was lit up from behind. It displayed, transparently, an environment of tropical vegetation, which caught the marmoset’s attention. Tornada counted precisely sixty seconds, demanded by the experiment, then switched off the current, which extinguished his projector.
“I congratulate you; you’ve been very good. I’ve made you chew the fat, now you can chew the nut and fidget at your ease.”
The little hands took possession of the peanut and shelled it in order to devour it.
Tornada returned the light; it was only then that he perceived Vion’s presence. “You, here!” He exclaimed. “I forbade you to go out!”
“If you knew what had happened to me, old man!”
“It must be serious for you not to ask me questions about what I’ve just been doing with this little darling?”
“Very serious.”
“Which means that it’s to do with that idiotic examining magistrate.”
“You knew, then?”
“Without being malign, yes, I had anticipated it, from certain questions the mollusk asked me on the day of the autopsy. Tell me all the same. But you seem to me to be unsteady on your feet. Sit down. Take this little one’s place while I sort out my machinery. Unfortunately, I don’t have any other seat to offer you.”
Félix Vion succeeded the marmoset on the stool. What he related was sufficiently captivating for Tornada to think that he was still dealing with the marmoset, drawing the curtains again and recommencing the projection of his rays. Thinking that this action was required by a final discharge of the projector before it was put away, Félix, dominated by his excitement, did not pay any heed to it.
He gave an account of the magistrate’s recent visit, the demands that the latter had made, craftily probing his relationship with the Baron; the inheritance that he would obtain; the disguise he had worn, to which the Baronne had added a dagger; the time at which he had left the house, after having collected his own coat from the cloakroom, and then come back to return the dagger; and why, although his auto was at the door, he had returned home on foot. Then, brutally, the magistrate had revealed that he had been seen bidding adieu to the Baron.
In vain Félix had insisted with regard to this last point that it could not be him, since he had gone without saying goodbye; the magistrate had not wanted to hear it, obstinately insisting that he had not left the party by way of the drawing room door opening to the hallway but t
hrough the library.
“The only thing he spared me,” Vion concluded, “was the accusation that I’m the murderer—but he must believe it, since he’s already having me followed. I had two policemen on my heels as I came here. They’re waiting for me outside.”
“You should have asked them to come in,” Tornada said. “In fact, what astonishes me is that you, the money-handler, haven’t thought, like de Clair, that money must be the motive for the crime. There’s scarcely any other motor of human action than money. Now, in this instance, who can have been driven to get rid of Sasoitsu? I can only see two: either the dispossessed spouse, or you, the successor.”
“How could Betty, lavished with everything by her husband, have been led by self-interest?”
“What about the enormous sum that Sasoitsu was proposing to withdraw from his fortune in order to found a Japanese Cité Universitaire in Paris?”
“It was still only a project.”
“Which, if realized, would have cut the grass under the feet of the ostentatious Betty.”
“Get away! You’re mistaken to suspect her so black-hearted. She is, to be sure, a creature of luxury, so wasteful that I would have liked to deter Sasoitsu from marrying her, but between that and being capable of such an abominable crime there’s an abyss. Besides which, you observed yourself her reactions when she found her husband dead, her subsequent attitude in the course of the funeral and her persistent despair since, all of which gives the lie to such a monstrous supposition.”
“Well, she was famously tragic on the screen, when her tears drew more from the eyes of the audience.”
“Do you know how studio tears are obtained? Look elsewhere. Betty’s above suspicion.”
“I think so too,” said Tornada, picking up the telephone, which was ringing. “Send them to the lab,” he ordered. To his friend he said, sarcastically: “Well, everything is working out as I expected. You’ll have the honor of handcuffs, my old Félix. To amuse myself better, I’ll return the light.”
Tornada did not require any introduction to the person who came in first. It was the popular novelist, recovered from his illness, who had made the initial official observation of the murder. Nor did Vion fail to recognize the gentleman and the man in the cap who followed him in.
“I greatly regret Doctor...”
“All right, all right,” Tornada cut in. “I know what brings you here. The prelude to a magnificent blunder, which is already appearing as a feuilleton under your pseudonym.”
“I don’t see what’s fictional about arresting, on the order of the court, a gentleman who pretends to be ill and then takes a powder.”
“The only powder is in the eyes of the one who sent you. But I’m not astonished. Do your job. I’ll put things right later.”
“In the name of the law, Monsieur Vion, will you come with me?”
Tornada responded to his friend’s alarm with a shrug of his shoulders. He accompanied him as far as the exit from the clinic, watched him climb into the policemen’s taxi, and bade him farewell with a promise of some fine amusement. Perched on his shoulder, the marmoset completed the flamboyance of his adieu.
He brought the little animal back to the laboratory. He took it in his arms and looked it in the face ecstatically.
“You don’t suspect, O tardigrade offspring of our common ancestors, that you’ll be the first one to have helped me unravel this thread, do you? So I shall be grateful to you for the rest of my life. I’ll have Félix buy you a gilded cage, with as many peanuts as your little belly can contain. Nevertheless, in order that you don’t take it into your head to go blabbing to the law, permit me to confide you to the radiator.”
He attached the marmoset to it with a string, after which he returned the laboratory to obscurity. He only retained a little red light behind the screen, now blank again, which was nevertheless sufficient for his to devote himself to work so absorbing that it could not be anything other than yet another excursion into the domain of the unknown. He forgot to visit the patients on whom he had operated.
In the course of the afternoon of that same day, Tornada ordered his auto. He hastened to the house in the Avenue de l’Alma. He rang in vain. The door still not opening, he knocked repeatedly. The chauffeur Abrovici finally presented his face, illuminated by the red birthmark. He apologized for the concierge, who had gone to the pharmacy to fetch medicines prescribed by the local doctor, who had been called for Madame la Baronne.
“You weren’t able to call me, then?”
“We thought about it, but the matter was urgent. Madame la Baronne has had a fainting fit.”
“I’ll go see her.”
“Madame la Baronne asked not to be disturbed.”
“That doesn’t apply to me.”
He went upstairs. Marie, the chambermaid, was on the landing. She too, in order to hold Tornada back, invoked her poor employer’s heath. Madame la Baronne was so exhausted that they were wondering whether it would not be desirable to take her away from the environment where everything maintained her sadness, caused by the state of her nerves. The physician had given her that advice.
“Announce me.”
“She might be asleep.”
“It doesn’t matter. Wake her up.”
Betty was not asleep. Huddled in her bed, her forehead circled by a calming compress, she offered her visitor a limp hand and a gaze ravaged by insomnia. Tornada was only reassured when he ascertained that her pulse was beating normally.
“My dear friend, I regret importuning you at a time when you’re so ill that you addressed yourself to someone other than me...”
“That was Marie, who takes fright too quickly...”
“She did well. Me, I’m a cutter, I don’t know much about medicine. But I was in a hurry to inform you about a serious event. Can you imagine that Félix has just been arrested?”
“Arrested! What do you mean?
“Well…I see mo other means of expressing it when a Commissaire of Police...”
“The police!” she gasped. “For what reason? Something to do with the bank?”
“Come on—the bank is untouchable.”
“Because of Tani, then?”
“Yes, because of him.”
That frightful information acted more rapidly than the pharmaceuticals Marie brought in at that moment. She spilled the glass of water that diluted them on the carpet. She sat up in bed and snatched away the compress. Her beautiful eyes lit up with revolt, in the fashion that she had been able to express so well on the screen.
“But that’s abominable! How are reasonable people able to imagine that a man like Félix could be involved in a murder? Of his best friend, as well!”
“Not for being involved in it, but for having committed it, with his own hand, my dear Baronne.”
“That’s how our law operates!”
“Stupid! But the law has an excuse. One never knows what is going on in the depths of an individual, no matter how estimable he might be—the moment of recklessness that might drive him to introduce a few centimeters of metal into the right place to harvest the cash.”
“It’s you who are saying that?”
“Not about Félix, of course. Although, after all, certain circumstances are in league against him. Have you read the newspapers?”
“I don’t read them since they treated me so unjustly when I made my debut as an actress. All the more reason when they stir up this story. Tani’s no longer here…how do you expect anything else to matter?”
“Félix is still here!”
“That’s true…so I’m determined to do everything possible to get him out of the claws of these imbeciles. I’ll devote my entire fortune to it, if necessary.”
“Millions and millions? That would be excessive. No human life is worth that much.”
“Yes—Félix’s!”
“I think that a personal protest to the court is requisite first.”
“I won’t neglect that either! I’ll go to see the prosecutor,
the examining magistrate. Will they even let me in?”
“One can pay them for that.”
“I’ll go!”
Paying no heed to her state of undress she leapt out of bed. Her long night-dress and her flowing hair made her the image of a heroine.
Had she sensed the irony of some of Tornada’s remarks? It did not seem so. In any case, that fashion of joking coldly about everything was the inverse aspect of the man, so different from others. He did not even respect a magistracy that was honorable in every regard.
Betty also tolerated hearing herself complimented in the same tone.
“It’s in that fresh-out-of-bed fashion that you ought to confront those morons. You’re bringing them the Truth, and the Truth springs forth from a well stark naked. Decency, in our epoch, no longer authorizes that simple apparel, but as one can divine beneath your night attire an anatomy that goes back to Venus, I’m convinced that you’d influence them in Félix’s favor. With that, I’ll bid you farewell.”
“You’re not going with me?”
“Impossible. I’m overwhelmed. And then, I don’t have an odor of sanctity at the Palais. So, adieu.”
He headed for the door, but he did not go out. He came back to Betty, took her by the arm, drew her to the window and studied her face for some time.
“Be careful!”
“Of what!”
“Of your little wrinkles. It seems to me that they’re accentuating. An effect of grief, evidently. I wouldn’t like you to get to the point of camouflaging yourself, like so many others obstinate in clinging to youth. They don’t suspect, poor things that thy only end up making a horror of themselves. For myself, when I encounter them, those old frumps, with bleached blonde hair and bright red lipstick, with matching fingernails, I shiver all the way to the marrow of my bones. You’re nearly forty, aren’t you? It’s no longer spring, but it might, perhaps be the brightness of a beautiful summer. Nevertheless, be careful? The cellular life of the organism is that of all nature. The flesh withers; autumn arrives, with the imprint of wrinkles—and in you, autumn might be precipitated by a moral misfortune. That’s why I’m warning you not to wait too long to have recourse to my rays. One never knows when one might need to rely one day or another on one’s charms.”
The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3) Page 18