Johnson occupies in this hotel—once luxurious but long since out of fashion—a suite consisting of a foyer, a living room, a bedroom, bathroom and terrace. He has returned to it at seven-fifteen, noticed that the monthly search of his papers had been made, with the customary clumsiness, in the drawers of the desk and the filing cabinet, and he has gone to take his shower. He has then looked at his mail. The letters from Macao, delivered during the afternoon, contained nothing particular. Johnson knows, in any case, that no important matter can be discussed by mail, since the secret service opens his correspondence before it is delivered to him. He finishes dressing (in a light suit of white poplin), while making notes on the proof sheet of an advertising poster he has to send back once it is corrected. The bother of having to put on a silk shirt and his excessively heavy tuxedo, in such heat, has made him decide not to go to Lady Bergmann’s party; he rereads the invitation card, with the printed words “cocktails, dancing,” and the words “theatrical performance at eleven” added by hand (for only a certain number of the guests); he tears it across, then tosses it in the basket. He will telephone tomorrow to give the excuse of a migraine for his absence. Dining on tasteless meat and boiled vegetables in the huge, almost empty dining room, he glances through the Hong Kong Evening. It is here that he happens to see the headline announcing the death of Edouard Manneret.
The article is very brief, of the last-minute news-flash variety. Nothing is said as to the exact nature of this so-called accident; and there is not, of course, any reference to Kito. Nonetheless, we must now return to Johnson’s relations with the little Japanese girl. The American has used her very little for his personal pleasures, since—as has been said—his senses found their employment elsewhere: the girl served only as a supernumerary, a secondary character, in some compositions in which Laureen always played the leading part—if not the gentlest one. This was during the time when Kito was an inmate of the villa; if Johnson subsequently removed her, it was with a quite different intention—to subject her to experiments on which he based his future wealth, which he saw as already considerable. (His present income, based on well-established enterprises in Macao and Canton, was of more modest dimensions.) It should be mentioned here that the cultivation of toxic plants which he had recently undertaken, on the other side of the border, involved many species besides poppies, hemp and erythroxylum: as a matter of fact Johnson sold, in the Chinatowns of the world, from the Indian Ocean to San Francisco, all kinds of remedies, poisons, youth potions, love philters, aphrodisiacs, whose effects—described in alluring terms by illustrated prospectuses, or by the advertisements of shops with a special clientele—did not involve the vendor’s imagination exclusively. His latest idea, which would surpass the fame of the too famous “Tiger balms,” was a preparation half derived from the science of plants and half from magic, whose formula he had discovered in the recent edition of a religious book of the Chou period. But Johnson was neither a magician nor a pharmacist nor a botanist. He merely possessed certain commercial gifts which he often exercised at the expense of his associates: he had joined forces, for example, under cover of one of the many companies he was constantly founding, with a young Dutchman of good family, named Marchant, who had ultimately committed suicide for reasons still undisclosed, but certainly linked with their mutual enterprises, apropos of which he himself had never felt the slightest embarrassment. The man he needed this time, for the development and testing of the potion, simultaneously a physician, a chemist, and something of a fetish expert, was the famous Edouard Manneret, who further possessed—it was said—a colossal fortune and probably had no lucrative expectations from the exercise of his talents. He was addicted, on the other hand, to both vampirism and necrophilia, so that the death of Kito, on whom the new product proved its efficacity by the absolute mastery it left to the beneficiary, must soon have passed into the losses and gains of the association.
The police are not concerned about the disappearance of a prostitute, even one underage; especially since the little Japanese girl, secretly arrived from Nagasaki on a smuggler’s junk, did not figure on any official list or immigration form. Her bloodless body, marked only by a tiny wound at the base of the neck, just above the clavicle, was sold to be served with various sauces in a well-known Aberdeen restaurant. The Chinese cuisine has the advantage of making its contents unrecognizable. It is obvious, nonetheless, that the meal’s origin was revealed—with proofs to support the matter—to certain customers of either sex with depraved tastes, who consented to pay high prices in order to consume this kind of meat; prepared with particular care, it was served to them in the course of ritual banquets whose setting, as well as the various excesses to which these celebrations gave rise, necessitated a private dining room located apart from the regular rooms. The fat man with the red face describes with delighted precision some of the perversions committed under such circumstances, then continues his story. Manneret, who had thus rid himself quite ingeniously of a bothersome piece of evidence, had made the mistake of coming to participate in one of these ceremonies. Under the effects of the euphoria induced by wine, a guest (a disguised policeman who had become a member of the group only in hopes of deriving some dishonest profit by doing so) was able to hear from his own lips, toward the dinner’s end, certain remarks which, though not precisely clear, nonetheless gave the indiscreet inquirer the desire to know more. A skillful investigation, conducted among the servants and neighbors of the Kowloon apartment, revealed that he had not been wrong to follow this trail, one branch of which then led him to the New Territories plantation and to the American, Ralph Johnson.
When the policeman knew enough about Kito’s death, he obviously wanted to blackmail Manneret, since on the one hand the latter’s responsibility in the crime was quite direct, and on the other he possessed enough to pay a high price to get off free. Johnson’s turn would come later. What then happens has remained confused. Doubtless Manneret, out of pride and defiance, refused to buy a silence which nothing, moreover, could guarantee. Or did he pretend to agree, in order to draw his blackmailer into a trap and get rid of him in another fashion? The fact remains that, at the moment when the officer appears in the millionaire’s residence, in that ultramodern luxury apartment building with its labyrinths of mirrors and its sliding panels, Edouard Manneret makes him open the door and receives him in his office, offering him a chair and treating him cordially, though speaking of other matters, as is his habit in such cases. He asks his visitor if he has been in the Colony long, if the country agrees with him, if he endures the climate easily despite the difficult profession in which he is engaged, etc. While speaking, and without paying much attention to the fact that the other man answers only in monosyllables (embarrassed, annoyed, suspicious?), he takes the trouble to serve him an apéritif with his own hands, even apologizing for having to turn his back a few seconds while he is doing something at the little bar.
A moment later, they are sitting opposite each other; the crooked policeman in an armchair made of steel tubes, and beside him (on the narrow tray attached to the arm) the stemmed glass of delicate crystal containing a liquid the color of sherry, and Manneret himself in his rocking chair, where he rocks, smiling, while he continues the conversation. Twice his taciturn interlocutor grasps the engraved base of the glass and raises it to bring the liquid to his lips; but each time, he sets it down again on the tray, on the excuse of listening more closely to what his host is saying, so that the latter decides to be silent; and he stares at the policeman as if he were trying to disconcert him, in hopes that he will take a drink at last to gain assurance. Indeed, the man again begins his gesture that has already been interrupted twice, but, at the last moment, his gaze meets—above the carefully trimmed goatee and the slender, arched nose—the too brilliant eyes with their slightly squinting lids which are staring at him with what seems to him to be abnormal intensity. Does he suddenly remember the disturbing products Johnson raises? Is he realizing that his host’s apéritif, of whic
h the latter has already drunk several mouthfuls, does not look quite the same as his own? He makes a sudden movement with his left hand, the movement of a man trying to drive off a mosquito (an absurd pretext in this air-conditioned house, whose windows cannot be opened to admit insects) and the glass he is holding in the other hand slips and falls to the marble floor, where it breaks into a hundred pieces. . . . The splinters which glitter amid the spilled liquid, the drops spattered in all directions around a central star-shaped puddle, the foot of the glass still almost intact and now bearing, instead of the goblet, only a triangle of curved crystal, pointed like a dagger—all this has long since been known. Rut I ask Lady Ava why the blackmailer has not, upon his arrival at Manneret’s that evening, discussed his intention of obtaining payment of a first installment at once, since matters had reached this point.
“He probably said why he was there,” she answers; “the Old Man must have pretended not to hear the remark and he covered it up with his chatter about hard work, the climate, and the drinks. The other man preferred not to make the conversation difficult, since he was certain of having all the trump cards in his own hand and thought he would lose nothing by a few minutes’ chat, which left his man time for thought.”
“Hadn’t Manneret already had several days to think?”
“No,” she says, “that’s not certain. His friendliness at first was the result of the fact that he still didn’t know precisely what it was this man wanted, whom he had met once at a dinner in Aberdeen, and who had turned up on some excuse or other—something to do with the building, for example.”
“Manneret had his office to deal with such matters. Even his checks were signed by his attorney. He no longer bothered to deal in person with anything except very big deals; and even then, not before they had gone through the hands of his advisers, who studied them in detail and then gave him the results of their calculations.”
Lady Ava reflects on this aspect of the problem, which takes her a little unawares, for no reference has yet been made to Manneret’s professional activities. But she quickly recovers herself: “Well,” she says, “the excuse could have had some more intimate nature: with him, there was no lack of reasons.”
“So it was an intimate reason, but with no connection to Kito’s death?”
“Yes, that’s it: he was selling little girls, or heroin, or something.”
“Yet if Manneret hadn’t had good reasons to think he was in danger, he wouldn’t have tried to poison his visitor right away, or drug him, or something of the kind.”
“Who says that’s what he did?”
“That detail of filling the glass with his back turned, and with a liquid which didn’t have quite the same color as the real sherry from the bottle?”
“Oh no! That could be just the crooked policeman’s imagination, or his bad conscience. Such people are suspicious on principle. And in any case, he didn’t risk anything by getting rid of the drink once he suspected it, even slightly.”
“Right. Let’s say things went just as you say: the man comes, supposedly to sell dope, Manneret talks about one thing and another, trying to sound him out, and see whether he’s dealing with an agent provocateur or a blackmailer. Right. . . . Then what did that remark about his visitor’s ‘hard job’ mean?”
“I don’t know. . . . Perhaps the other man had said straight off that he was in the police, to inspire confidence.”
“Let’s say he did. Then the policeman explains the real purpose of his visit, and demands money. Does he name a figure?”
“No. At first he must proceed by allusions: ‘Don’t you think it would be in your interest, my dear sir, to keep it from being discovered how you . . .’ You see?”
“All right. And Manneret pretends he hasn’t heard a word, he sips his sherry and goes on rocking and keeps talking—about one thing and another. Maybe he really hasn’t understood what the man wants, if the insinuations were too obscure. The other man isn’t in any hurry: he figures he has time and that he will finally make his point. . . . Then why did he kill Manneret, a few minutes later?”
“Yes,” she says, “that’s the question.”
“And a second question is about the kind of glass—you don’t serve sherry in a champagne glass. Besides, the pointed splinter that sticks up from the base, the one that could also serve as a ‘dagger,’ doesn’t correspond to the wide curve of the glass.”
“No, obviously not. It must have been something longer than it was wide, and conical rather than round at the bottom: what they call a ‘flute’. . . .”
“And the crystal surely wasn’t as thin as the kind in a champagne glass or a flute, if it was used as a weapon—and a mortal one into the bargain.”
“But actually,” she says, “that isn’t the weapon that killed him. It was all a setting intended to camouflage the crime as an accident. The murderer used a Chinese stiletto with a spring blade covered with poison—once it’s telescoped, it’s easily concealed in any little pocket, or even in the hollow of the palm. It was afterward that he arranged the body on the fragments of the broken glass, as if the wound at the base of the neck had been produced by the crystal point still attached to the stem: ‘Manneret must have fallen with a glass in his hand . . .’, etc.”
The murderer had added some elements to complete the scene: a little empty ampoule that had contained morphine, intended to explain the millionaire’s unsteadiness at the moment of his strange fall: a sliding glass panel, half closed—almost invisible—against the edge of which he must have crashed; finally, the alarm clock on the other side of this plate glass, on the desk, with the alarm hand set at the precise moment of the death. . . . The alarm rang; to shut off this irritating noise, Manneret has stood up from his rocking chair, holding his glass of sherry in one hand; in his addict’s clumsiness and haste, he hasn’t seen that the glass partition is sliding across his path, barring his way. More concerned with decoration than verisimilitude, the theater director also removes the corpse’s shoes and puts them back on inversely: the right shoe on the left foot, and the left shoe on the right foot. A final detail before leaving the stage: with deceased’s pen and ink, on the very page he had been writing, after the last, hesitant words—about half a line at the end of a long interrupted paragraph which already descends to the middle of the page: “to foreign parts, and not gratuitous”—he concludes, imitating the uncertain calligraphy: “but necessary” then he draws an oval fish, with its three fins, its triangular tail and its big round eyes.
It is in this state that Kim finds matters when she enters the apartment, having merely had to push open the door whose bolt was not fastened, which has surprised her. She stops in the middle of the foyer, her ear cocked. Not a sound can be heard throughout the house. She decides that Manneret is still at his desk, in the office. She walks in this direction, silently as usual. In the den, separated from the office by a glass panel which is half shut, she sees the Old Man lying at full length on the floor, on his belly. Only his head is turned to one side, the left hand still holding the stem of a broken glass which has slashed his throat in his fall. All around him are fragments of crystal, the spilt sherry, and blood, but in quite small quantities. Kim approaches with tiny, muffled steps, as if she were afraid of waking the dead man, on whose face she keeps her eyes fixed. Noticing the delicate wound and the point of glass piercing it, the young servant girl cannot help raising her hand to her own neck, at the place where, just above the left clavicle, her fingers encounter the still recent little scar. Then her mouth opens gradually and she begins screaming, without taking her eyes off the corpse, and this time her scream fills the whole apartment, the whole house, the whole street. . . .
No, it is still the same mute scream, which cannot escape her throat as she dashes down the stairs, two at a time, three at a time. As she passes, the doors open, dark figures are framed in the doorways, silhouetted against the bright light of the foyers, which makes it impossible to make out the faces. Yet it is evident from their clothe
s that it is men who appear on each landing and fling themselves in pursuit. They must have seen the Old Man’s body, or the blood dripping down through the floor, and they think she has killed him. There are more of them on each floor. She leaps down the steps four at a time, five, six, but her delicate gilded shoes make no sound on the elastic surface of the stairs, and the others too, behind her, run faster and faster on the padded stairs. . . . Yet they do not seem to be gaining ground on the fleeing murderess, for when she turns to look behind her, she sees only the empty and silent staircase.
Then, without her having realized it, there is someone quite close to her, already descending the last flight that leads to the landing where she herself has just come to a halt. The place, fortunately, is very dimly lit. Cautiously, Kim draws back into an even darker corner, where she presses against the wall. Her dark dress will help her to remain unnoticed. . . . Fortunately, for the person who is approaching is doubtless looking for her; he is a tall man wearing a goatee and carrying a metal-tipped cane. Elegantly dressed in a suit of severe cut, he walks with a firm yet supple gait: the cane must be merely an ornamental or offensive accoutermcnt. When he comes opposite her, Kim, for a second, has the impression that he is the Old Man, but then she remembers that she has killed him. So it is only someone of the same age and who looks like him. He looks to the right, then to the left, in order to discover the criminal’s hiding place; yet he passes oblivious in front of the servant girl crouching in the corner, frozen with terror and about to faint from holding her breath so long. He moves away a little, leans on the railing and bends over it, to examine the lower part of the staircase. Certain that she will be discovered soon, Kim raises and puts into her mouth the piece of paper containing the compromising address; she moistens it with saliva, nibbles it and rolls it under her tongue, chews it carefully so as to swell it into a slippery wad which is immediately transformed into a gluey, tasteless paste which she swallows with disgust. But the almost imperceptible sound of her lips on the little piece of still stiff paper, at the beginning of the operation, must have attracted the pursuer’s attention: he turns around and inspects the landing in every direction. Then he walks stealthily toward one of the doors, and brings his cheek close to the varnished wood to listen to what is going on inside; he probably hears nothing of interest, for he returns to the equidistant, parallel and vertical iron rods which support the railing. He also rests his ear on this, as though in hopes of registering the metal’s revealing vibrations. Obtaining no further result here, apparently, he begins descending the next flight.
La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Djinn Page 19