“What in heaven’s name—” I began. And:
“In heaven’s name, ha! Yes, we shall have much to do in heaven’s name, my friend,” he cut in. “For a certainty we are aligned against a crew who ply their arts in hell’s name.”
6. The Veiled Lady Again
HARRISONVILLE’S NEWEST CITIZENS, GROSS weight sixteen pounds, twelve ounces, delayed their advent past all expectations that night, but with their overdue arrival came trying complications, and for close upon three hours two nurses, a badly worried young house physician and I fought manfully to bring mother and her twins back across death’s doorstep. It was well past midnight when I climbed my front steps, dog-tired, with hands that trembled from exhaustion and eyes still smarting from the glare of surgery lamps. “Half a gill of brandy, then bed—and no morning office hours tomorrow,” I promised myself as I tiptoed down the hall.
I poured the spirit out into a graduate and was in the act of draining it when the sudden furious clamor of the night bell arrested my upraised hand. Acquired instinct will not be denied. Scarcely aware of what I did, I put the brandy down untasted and stumbled, rather than walked, to the front door to answer the alarm.
“Doctor—Doctor, let me in—hide me. Quick, don’t let them see us talking!” the fear-sharpened feminine whisper cut through the darkened vestibule and a woman’s form lurched drunkenly forward into my arms. She was breathing in short, labored gasps, like a hunted creature.
“Quick—quick”—again that scarcely audible murmur, more pregnant with terror than a scream—“shut the door—lock it—bolt it—stand back out of the light! Please!”
I retreated a step or two, my visitor still clinging to me like a drowning woman to her rescuer. As we passed beneath the ceiling-light I took glance at her, I was vaguely conscious of her charm, of her beauty, of her perfume, so delicate that it was but the faint, seductive shadow of a scent. A tightly fitting hat of black was set on her head, and draped from this, from eartip to eartip, was stretched a black-mesh veil, its upper edge just clearing the tip of her nose but covering mouth, cheeks and chin, leaving the eyes and brow uncovered. Through its diaphanous gauze I could see the gleam of carmined lips and tiny, pearl-like teeth, seemingly sharp as little sabers as the small, childish mouth writhed back from them in panic terror.
“Why—why”—I stammered—“it’s the lady we saw when we—”
“Perfectly; it is Mademoiselle l’Inconnue, the lady of the veil,” de Grandin finished as he descended the last three steps at a run, and in a lavender dressing-gown and purple kidskin slippers, a violet muffler draped round his throat, stepped nimbly forward to assist me with my lovely burden.
“What is it, Mademoiselle?” he asked, half leading, half carrying her toward the consulting-room; “have you perhaps come again to tell us that our search is vain?”
“No, no-o!” the woman moaned, leaning still more heavily upon us. “Help me, oh, help me, please! I’m wounded; they—he—oh, I’ll tell you everything!”
“Excellent!” de Grandin nodded as he flung back the door and switched on the electric lights. “First let us see your hurt, then—mon Dieu, Friend Trowbridge, she had swooned!”
Even as he spoke the woman buckled weakly at the knees, and like a lovely doll from which the sawdust has been let, crumpled forward toward the floor.
I freed one hand from her arm, intent on helping place her on the table, and stared at it with an exclamation of dismay. The fingers were dyed to the knuckles with blood, and on the girl’s dark motor coat an ugly dull-red stain was sopping-wet and growing every moment.
“Très bien, so!” de Grandin murmured, placing his hands beneath her arms and heaving her up the examination table. “She will be better here, for—Dieu des chiens, my friend, observe!”
As the heavy outdoor wrap the woman wore fell open we saw that it, a pair of modish patent leather pumps, her motor gloves and veil-draped hat were her sole wardrobe. From veil-swathed chin to blue-veiled instep she was as nude as on the day she came into the world.
No wound showed on her ivory shoulders or creamy breast, but on her chest, immediately above the gently swelling breasts, was a medallion-shaped outline or cicatrix inside which was crudely tattooed this design:
“Good heavens?” I exclaimed. “What is it?”
“Précisément, what is it—and what are these?” the little Frenchman countered, ripping aside the flimsy veil and exposing the girl’s pale face. On each cheek, so deeply sunk into the flesh below the malar points that they could only be the result of branding, were two small cruciform scars, perhaps three-quarters of an inch in height by half an inch in width, describing the device of a passion cross turned upside-down.
“Why, of all ungodly things—” I began, and:
“Ha, ungodly do you say, mon vieux? Pardieu, you call it by its proper name!” said Jules de Grandin. “An insult to le bon Dieu was intended, for this poor one wears upon her body—”
“I c-couldn’t stand it!” moaned the girl upon the table. “Not that—not that! He looked at me and smiled and put his baby hand against my cheek! He was the image of my dear little—no, no, I tell you! You mustn’t! O-o-oh, no!”
For a moment she sobbed brokenly, then: “Oh, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! Remember not our offenses nor the offenses of our forefathers—spare us, good Lord—I will, I tell you! Yes I’ll go to him and tell, if—Doctor de Grandin”—her voice sank to a sibilant whisper and she half rose from the table, glaring about with glazed, unseeing eyes—“Doctor de Grandin, watch for the chalk-signs of the Devil—follow the pointing tridents; they’ll lead you to the place when—oh, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! Have pity, Jesu!”
“Delirium,” I diagnosed. “Quick, de Grandin, she’s running a pretty high temperature. Help me turn her; the wound seems in her back.”
It was. Puncturing the soft flesh a little to the left of the right shoulder, glancing along the scapula, then striking outward to the shoulder tip was a gunshot wound, superficial, but undoubtedly painful, and productive of extensive hemorrhage.
With probe and cotton and mercurochrome we sterilized the wound, then made a gauze compress liberally sprinkled with Senn’s mixture and made it fast with cross-bandages of adhesive tape. Three-quarters of a grain of morphine injected in her arm provided a defense against recurring pain and sank her in a deep and peaceful sleep.
“I think she’d best be taken to a hospital,” I told him when our work was finished. “We’ve given all the first aid that we can, and she’ll be better tended there—we’ve no facilities for bed-rest here, or—”
“Agreed,” he broke in. “To City Hospital, by all means. They have a prison ward there.”
“But we can’t put her there,” I objected. “She’s guilty of no crime, and besides, she’s in no condition to go out alone for several days. She’ll be there when we want her without the need of bars to keep her in.”
“Not bars to keep her in,” he told me. “Bars to keep them out, my friend.”
“Them? Who—”
“The good God knows who, I only suspect what,” he answered. “Come, let us take her there without delay.”
“CAN’T BE DONE, SON,” Doctor Donovan told de Grandin when we arrived at City Hospital with our patient. “The prison ward’s exclusively reserved for gents and ladies on special leave from the hoosegow, or those with some specific charge pending against ’em. You’d not care to place a charge against the lady, would you?”
De Grandin considered him a moment. “Murder is still a relatively serious offense, even in America,” he returned thoughtfully. “Can not she be held as a material witness?”
“To whose murder?” asked the practical Donovan.
“The little Eastman boy’s—he who was stolen from the Baptist Home last night,” the Frenchman replied.
“Hold on, feller, be your age,” the other cautioned. “Who says the little lad’s been murdered? The police can’t even find him alive, and till they find his body the
re’s no corpus delicti to support a murder charge.”
Once more the Frenchman gazed somberly at him: “Whether you know it or not, my friend,” he answered seriously, “that little one is dead. Dead as mutton, and died most unpleasantly—like the sinless little lamb he was. Yes.
“Maybe you’ve got some inside dope on the case?” Donovan suggested hopefully.
“No—only reason and intuition, but they—”
“They won’t go here,” the other cut in. “We can’t put this girl in the prison ward without a warrant of some sort, de Grandin: it’s against the rules and as much as my job’s worth to do it. There might be all sorts of legal complications: suits for false imprisonment, and that sort of thing. But see here, she came fumbling at your door mumbling all sorts of nonsense and clearly out of her head, didn’t she?”
The Frenchman nodded.
“All right, then, we’ll say she was batty, loony, balmy in the bean, as they say in classic Siamese. That’ll give us an excuse for locking her up in H-3, the psychopathic ward. We’ve got stronger bars on those windows than we have in the prison ward. Plenty o’ room there, too: no one but some souses sleeping off D.T.’s and the effects of prohibition whoopee. I’ll move ’em over to make room for—by the way, what’s your little playmate’s name, anyhow?”
“We do not know,” returned de Grandin. “She is une inconnue.”
“Hell, I can’t spell that,” Donovan assured him. “We’ll have to write her down unknown. All right?”
“Quite,” the little Frenchman answered with a smile. “And now you will receive her?”
“Sure thing,” the other promised.
“Hey, Jim!” he hailed an orderly lounging in the corridor, “bring the agony cart. Got another customer for H-3. She’s unconscious.”
“O.K., Chief,” the man responded, trundling forward a wheeled stretcher.
Frightened, pitiful moans of voyagers in the borderland of horror sifted through the latticed doors of the cells facing the corridors of H-3 as we followed the stretcher down the hall. Here a gin-crazed woman sobbed and screamed in mortal terror at the phantoms of alcoholic delirium; there a sodden creature, barely eighteen, but with the marks of acute nephritis already on her face, choked and regurgitated in the throes of deathly nausea. “Three rousing cheers for the noble experiment,” Doctor Donovan remarked, an ugly sneer gathering at the corners of his mouth. “I wish to God those dam’ prohibitionists had to drink a few swigs of the kind of poison they’ve flooded the country with! If I had my way—”
“Jasus!” screamed a blear-eyed Irishwoman whose cell we passed. “Lord ha’ mercy on us: ’Tis she!” For a moment she clung to the wicket of her door like a monkey to the bars of its cage, staring horror-struck at the still form upon the stretcher.
“Take it easy, Annie,” Donovan comforted. “She won’t hurt you.”
“Won’t hur-rt me, is it?” the woman croaked. “Won’t har-rm me, wid th’ Divil’s silf mar-rchin’ down th’ hall beside her! Can’t you see th’ horns an’ tail an’ the flashin’, fiery eyes of ’im as he walks beside her, Doctor darlin’? Oh, Lord ha’ mercy; bless an’ save us, Howly Mither!” She signed herself with the cross, and stared with horror-dazed, affrighted eyes at the girl on the litter till our pitiful procession turned the bend that shut us from her sight.
7. The Mutter of a Distant Drum
IT WAS A WINDY night of scudding clouds which had brought a further fall of snow, and our progress was considerably impeded as we drove home from the hospital. I was nearly numb with cold and on the verge of collapse with fatigue when we finally stabled the car and let ourselves in the back door. “Now for that dose of brandy and bed,” I promised myself as we crossed the kitchen.
“Yes, by blue,” de Grandin agreed vigorously, “you speak wisdom, my friend. Me. I shall be greatly pleased to join you in both.”
By the door of the consulting-room I halted. “Queer,” I muttered. “I’d have sworn we turned the lights off when we left, but—”
“S-s-sh!” De Grandin’s sibilant warning cut me short as he edged in front of me and drew the small but vicious automatic pistol, which he always carried, from its holster underneath his left armpit. “Stand back, Friend Trowbridge, for I, Jules de Grandin, will deal with them!” He dashed the door wide open with a single well-directed kick, then dodged nimbly back, taking shelter behind the jamb and leveling his pistol menacingly. “Attention, hands up—I have you covered!” he called sharply.
From the examination table, where he had evidently been asleep, an under-sized individual bounced rather than rose, landing cat-like on both feet and glaring ferociously at the door where de Grandin had taken cover.
“Assassin!” he shouted, clenching his fists and advancing half a pace toward us.
“Morbleu, he has found us!” de Grandin almost shrieked. “It is the apache, the murderer, the robber of defenseless little ones and women! Have a care, monster”—he leaped into the zone of light shed by the desk lamp and brandished his pistol—“stand where you are, if you would go on living your most evil life!”
Disdainful of the pistol as though it were a pointed finger the other advanced, knees bent in an animal-crouch, hands half closed, as though preparing for a death grip on de Grandin’s throat. A single pace away he halted and flung wide his arms. “Embrasse-moi!” he cried; and in another moment they were locked together in a fond embrace like sweethearts reunited after parting.
“Oh, Georges, mon Georges, you are the curing sight for tired eyes: You are truly heaven-sent!” de Grandin cried when he had in some measure regained his breath. “Between the sight of your so unlovely face and fifty thousand francs placed in my hand, I should assuredly have chosen you, mon petit singe!” To me he added:
“Assuredly you recall Monsieur Renouard. Friend Trowbridge? Georges Jean Jacques Joseph Marie Renouard, Inspecteur du Service de la Sûreté Generale?”
“Of course,” I answered, shaking hands with the visitor. “Glad to see you again, Inspector.” The little colonial administrator had been my guest some years before, and he, de Grandin and I had shared a number of remarkable adventures. “We were just about to take a drink,” I added, and the caller’s bright eyes lit up with appreciation. “Won’t you join us?”
“Parbleu,” Renouard assured me. “I do most dearly love your language, Monsieur Trowbridge, and most of all I love the words that you just said!”
Our liquor poured, we sat and faced each other, each waiting for the other to begin the conversation. At length:
“I called an hour or so ago,” Renouard commenced, “and was admitted by your so excellent maid. She said that you were out, but bade me wait; then off she went to bed—nor do I think that she did count the silver first. She knows me. Yes. Bien alors, I waited, and fell asleep while doing so.”
I looked at him with interest. Though shorter by some inches than the average American, Renouard could not be properly called under-sized. Rather, he was a giant in miniature. His very lack of height gave the impression of material equilibrium and tremendous physical force. Instinctively one felt that the thews of his arms were massive as those of a gladiator and that his torso was sheathed in muscles like that of a professional wrestler. A mop of iron-gray hair was brushed back in an uprearing pompadour from his wide, low brow, and a curling white mustache adorned his upper lip, while from his chin depended a white beard cut square across the bottom in the style beloved of your true Frenchman. But most impressive of all was his cold, pale face—a face with the pallor of a statue—from which there burned a pair of big, deep-set eyes beneath circumflexes of intensely black and bushy brows.
“Eh bien, mon Georges,” de Grandin asked. “What storm wind blows you hither? You were ever the fisher in troubled water.”
Renouard gulped down his brandy, stroked his mustache and tugged his beard, then drew forth a Russian leather case from which he extracted a Maryland cigarette. “Women, parbleu! One sometimes wonders why the good God made them.”
He snapped an English lighter into flame and with painstaking precision set his puissant cigarette aglow, then folded his big white hands demurely in his lap and glanced inquiringly at us with his bright dark eyes as though we held the answer to his riddle.
“Tiens, my friend.” de Grandin laughed. “Had he not done so it is extremely probable that you and I would not be here indulging in this pleasant conversation. But women bring you here and why?”
Renouard expelled a double stream of acrid smoke from his nostrils, emitting a snort of annoyance at the same time. “One hardly knows the words to tell it,” he replied.
“The trouble starts in Egypt. During the war, and afterward until the end of martial law in 1923, Egypt, apart from the Continental system of maisons de tolerance, was outwardly at least as moral as London. But since the strong clean hand of Britain has been loosed there has been a constantly increasing influx of white slaves to the country. Today hardly a ship arrives in Alexandria without its quota of this human freight. The trade is old, as old as Nineveh and Tyre, and to suppress it altogether is a hopeless undertaking, but to regulate it, ah, that is something different.
“We were not greatly exercised when the numbers of unfortunate girls going from Marseilles increased in Egypt, but when respectable young girls—mais oui, girls of more than mere bourgeois respectability, even daughters of le beau monde, were sucked beneath the surface, later to be boiled up as inmates of those infamous Blue Houses of the East—then we did begin to take sharp notice.
“They sent for me. ‘Renouard,’ they said, ‘investigate and tell us what is which.’
“Très bon, I did commence. The dossiers of half a dozen girls I took, and from the ground upward I did build their cases. Name of a little blue man!” He leaned forward, speaking a low, impressive tone scarce above a whisper: “There was devilment, literally, I mean, my friends, in that business. By example:
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