The Dark Angel

by Seabury Quinn

  The thought occurred to Jules de Grandin and me at once.

  “Alice—” I began, and:

  “Yes, parbleu, Mademoiselle Alice!” cried de Grandin. “That message which she had, that constant but not understood command: ‘Alice, come home!’ It was undoubtlessly so given her. Remember, a day or so before she first received a spy of theirs, pretending to be seeking curios for some collector, came to the house, and saw the marriage girdle of the Yezidees. That was what he wanted, to assure himself that the Alice Hume their spies had run to earth was indeed the one they sought, the descendant of that high priest’s daughter of the ancient days, she who had run off with the Christian Englishman. Yes, par la barbe d’un chat, no wonder that she could write nothing else upon her ouija board that day: no wonder she puzzled why she had that thought-impression of command to go. Already they had planted in her mind the order to abandon home and love and God and to join herself to their unholy ranks!

  “By blue, my Georges, you have solved two problems for us. It was you who told us of the meaning of that shrilling cry which Friend Trowbridge and I did hear the night on which she disappeared and which made the hospital attachés unable to repel invasion of their ward; now you have thrown more light upon the subject, and we know it was that Mademoiselle Alice had that thought-command to leave before she could suspect that such things were.

  “I think it would be wise if we consulted—”

  “Detective Sergeant Costello,” Nora McGinnis announced from the dining-room door.

  “Ah, my friend, come in,” de Grandin cried. “You are in time to share a new discovery we have made.”

  Costello had no answering smile for the little Frenchman’s greeting. His eyes were set in something like a stare of horror, and his big, hard-shaven chin trembled slightly as he answered:

  “An’ ye’re in time to share a discovery wid me, sor, if ye’ll be good enough to shtep into th’ surgery a moment.”

  Agog with interest we followed him into the surgery, watched him extract a paper parcel from his overcoat pocket and tear off the outer wrappings, disclosing a packet of oiled silk beneath.

  “What is it? What have you found?” de Grandin questioned eagerly.

  “This,” the Irishman returned. “Look here!” He tore the silken folds apart and dumped their contents on the instrument table. A pair of little hands, crudely severed at the wrists, lay on the table’s porcelain top.

  10. Wordless Answers

  DE GRANDIN WAS THE first to recover from the shock. The double background of long practice as a surgeon and years of service with the secret police had inured him to such sights as would break the nerve of one merely a doctor or policeman. Added to this was an insatiable curiosity which drove him to examine everything he saw, be it beautiful or hideous. With a touch as delicate as though he had been handling some frail work of woven glass he took one of the little hands between his thumb and forefinger, held it up to the surgery light and gazed at it with narrowed eyes and faintly pursed lips. Looking at him, one would have said he was about to whistle.

  “A child’s?” I asked, shrinking from too close examination of the ghastly relic.

  “A girl’s,” he answered thoughtfully. “Young, scarcely more than adolescent, I should say, and probably not well to do, though having inclination toward the niceties of life. Observe the nails.”

  He turned the small hand over, and presented it palm-downward for my scrutiny. “You will observe,” he added, “that they are nicely varnished and cut and filed to a point, though the shaping is not uniform, which tells us that the treatment was self-done, and not the work of a professional manicurist. Again, they are most scrupulously clean, which is an indication of the owner’s character, but the cuticle is inexpertly trimmed; another proof of self attention. Finally”—he turned the hand palm-up and tapped the balls of the fingers lightly—“though the digits are white and clean they are slightly calloused at the sides and the finger tips and the nail region are inlaid with the faintest lines of ineradicable soil—occupational discoloration which no amount of soap and scrubbing-brush will quite remove. Only acid bleacher or pumice stone would erase them, and these she either did not know of, or realized that their continued use would irritate the friction-skin. Enfin, we have here the very pretty hands of a young working girl possessing wholesome self-respect, but forced to earn her daily bread by daily toil. A factory operative, possibly, surely not a laundress or charwoman. There is too much work-soil for the first, too little for the second.”

  Again he held the hand up to the light. “I am convinced that this was severed while she was alive,” he declared. “See it is practically free of blood; had death occurred some time before the severance, the blood would not have been sufficiently liquid to drain off—though the operation might have been made a short time after death,” he added thoughtfully.

  “Have you anything to add, my friend?” he asked Costello.

  “No, sor. All we know is we found th’ hands,” the Irishman replied. “They wuz found layin’ side by side, wid th’ fingers touchin’, like they might ’a’ been clasped in prayer, but had fallen apart like, just outside th’ wall o’ convent garden, sor.”

  “Nom d’un miracle du bon Dieu!” exclaimed de Grandin, with that near-blasphemous intimacy he affected for the Deity. “I had some other things in mind tonight but this must take precedence. Come, let us go, rush, hasten, fly to where you found them, then lay our course from there until she shall be found!”

  THE CONVENT OF THE Sacred Heart stood on an elevation from which it overlooked surrounding territory, and in the hollow to the east lay the little settlement of Rupleyville, a neat but unpretentious place comprised for the most part of homes of thrifty Italians who had been graduated from section gangs upon the Lackawanna’s right of way to small truck-farming, huckstering or fruit-stand keeping. A general store, a bakery, a little church erected to Saint Rocco, and a shop in which two glass globes filled with colored water and the sign Farmacia Italiana proclaiming its owner’s calling were the principal edifices of the place.

  To the latter de Grandin led us, and introduced himself in a flood of voluble Italian. The little wrinkled pharmacist regarded him attentively, then replied torrentially waving his hands and elevating shoulders and eyebrows till I felt sure both would be separated from their respective sub-structures. At length:

  “Perfetto; eccellente!” de Grandin cried, raising his hat ceremoniously. “Many thanks, Signor. We go at once.” To us: “Come, my friends; I think that we are on the trail at last.”

  “What did you find out, sor?” Costello asked as the little Frenchman led us hurriedly down the single street the hamlet boasted.

  “Ah, but of course, I did forget you do not speak Italian,” de Grandin answered contritely. “When we had looked upon the spot where you did find the little hands, I told me, ‘It are useless to stand here staring at the earth. Either the poor one from whom those hands were cut are living or dead. In any event, she are not here. If she are alive, she might have wandered off though not far, for the bleeding from her severed wrists would be too extensive. If she are dead, she could not have moved herself, yet, since she are not here, some one must have moved her. Jules de Grandin, let us inquire.’

  “And so I led the way to this small village, and first of all I see the pharmacist’s shop. ‘Very good,’ I tell me, ‘the druggist are somewhat of a doctor; injured persons frequently appeal to him for help. Perhaps he will know something.’ And so I interrogate him.

  “He knew nothing of a person suffering grievous hurt, but he informed me that a most respectable old woman living near had come to him some time ago in greatest haste and implored that he would sell her opium, as well as something which would staunch the flow of blood. The woman was not suffering an injury. The inference is then that she sought the remedies for someone else. N’est-ce-pas? Of course. Very well, it is to her house that we go all quickly.”

  We halted at the small gate of a cottage gar
den. The paling fence was innocent of paint, but neatly whitewashed, as were the rough plank sidewalls of the house. An oil-lamp burned dimly in the single room the cottage boasted, and by its feeble light we saw an old woman, very wrinkled, but very clean, bending over a low bed which lay in shadow.

  De Grandin knocked imperatively on the whitewashed door, then, as no answer was forthcoming, pushed back the panels and stepped across the threshold.

  The room was nearly bare of furniture, the bed, a small table and two rough unpainted chairs completing its equipment. The little kerosene lamp, a cheap alarm clock and two gayly colored pictures of religious scenes were the sole attempts at ornament. The aged woman, scrupulously neat in smooth black gown and cheap jet brooch, straightened on her knees beside the bed as we came in and raised a finger to her wrinkled lips. “Quiet pleez,” she murmured. “She iss a-sleepa. I have give”—she sought the English word, then raised her shoulders in a shrug of impotence and finished in Italian—“I give oppio.”

  De Grandin doffed his hat and bowed politely, then whispered quickly in Italian. The woman listened, nodded once or twice, then rose slowly and beckoned us to follow her across the room. “Signori,” she informed us in a whisper. “I am a poor woman, me; but I have the means to live a little. At night—what you call him? si, scrub—I scrub floors in the bank at the city. Sometimes I come home by the bus at morning, sometimes I walk for save the money. Last night—this morning—I walk.

  “I pass the convento just when the dark is turning into light today, and I go for walk downhill to her I hear somebody groan—o-oh, a-ah! like that. I go for see who are in trouble, and find this povera lying in the snow.

  “Dio Santo, what you think? Some devil he have cut her arms off close by the hand! She is bleeding fast.

  “I call to her, she try for answer, but no can. What you think some more? That devil have cut out her tongue and blood run out her mouth when she try to speak!

  “I go for look some more. Santissima Madonna, her eyes have been put out! Oh, I tell you, Signori, it is, the sight of sadness that I see!

  “I think at first I run for help; then I think. ‘No, while I am gone she may die from bleeding. I take her with me.’ So I do.

  “I am very strong, me. All my life, in old country, in new country, I worka verree hard. Yes, sure. So I put her on my back—so!—and make the run—not walk, run—all way downhill to my house here. Then I put clothes upon her where her hands should be and put her in my bed; then I run all the way by the farmacia for medicine. The drug man not like for sell me oppio, but I beg him on my knee and tell him it is for save a life. Then he give it to me. I come back with a run and make soup of it and from it feed her with a spoon. At first she spit it out again, but after time she swallow it, and now she not feel no more pain. She is asleep, and when she wake I give her more until her hurt all better. I not know who she is, Signori, but I not like for see her suffer. She iss so young, so pretty, so—what you say?—niza? Yes. Sure.”

  De Grandin twisted his mustache and looked at her appreciatively. At length: “Madame, you are truly one of God’s good noblewomen,” he declared, and raised her gnarled and work-worn fingers to his lips as though they had been the white jeweled fingers of a countess.

  “Now, quick, my friends,” he called to us. “She must have careful nursing and a bed and rest and the best medical attendance. Call for an ambulance from the pharmacy, my sergeant. We shall await you here.”

  Swiftly, speaking softly in Italian, he explained the need of expert nursing to the woman, adding that only in a hospital could we hope to revive the patient sufficiently to enable her to tell us something of her assailants.

  “But no!” the woman told him. “That can not be, Signor. They have cut off her hands, they have cut out her tongue, they have put out her eyes. She can not speak or write or recognize the ones who did it, even though you made them arrest and brought them to her. Me, I think maybe it was the Mafia did this, though they not do like this before. They kill, yes; but cut a woman up like this, no. Sicilians verree bad men, but not bad like that, I think.”

  “Ma mere,” de Grandin answered, “though all you say is true, nevertheless I shall find a way for her to talk and tell us who has done this thing, and how we best may find him. How I shall do it I cannot tell, but that I shall succeed I am assured. I am Jules de Grandin, and I do not fail. Most of my life has been devoted to the healing of the sick and tracking down the wicked. I may not heal her hurts, for only God’s good self can grow new hands and replace her ruined eyes and tongue, but vengeance I can take on those who outraged her and all humanity when they did this shameful thing, and may Satan roast me on a spit and serve me hot in my own gravy with damned, detestable turnips as a garnish if I do not so, I swear it. She shall talk to me in hell’s despite.

  “Mais oui, you must accept it,” he insisted as he tendered her a bill and the woman made a gesture of refusal. “Think of your ruined gown, your soiled bed-clothing, and the trouble you have been to. It is your due, not a reward, my old one.”

  She took the money reluctantly, but thankfully, and he turned impatiently to me. “Stand by, my friend,” he ordered; “we must go with her when they have come, for every moment is of preciousness. Me, I do not greatly like the looks of things; the brutal way in which her hands were amputated, the exposure to the cold, the well-meaning but unhygienic measures of assistance which the kindly one has taken. Infection may set in, and we must make her talk before it is too late.”

  “Make her talk?” I echoed in amazement. “You’re raving, man! How can she talk without a tongue, or—?”

  “Ah bah!” he interrupted. “Keep the eyes on Jules de Grandin, good Friend Trowbridge. The Devil and his servants may be clever, but he is cleverer. Yes, by damn much more so!”

  The clanging ambulance arrived in a few minutes, for the call Costello sent was urgent, and a bored young intern, collegiate raccoon coat slipped on over his whites entered the cottage, the stretcher-bearers close behind him. “Hear you got a pretty bad case here—” he began, then straightened as he saw de Grandin. “Oh, I didn’t know you were in charge here, Doctor,” he finished.

  The little Frenchman, whose uncanny skill at surgery had made his name a by-word in the local clinics, smiled amiably. “Quickly, mon brave,” he ordered. “It is imperative that we should get her hence as rapidly as possible. I desire to converse with her.”

  “O.K., sir,” the youngster answered. “What’s wrong?” He drew out his report card and poised a pencil over it.

  De Grandin nodded to the litter-bearers to begin their task as he replied: “Both hands amputated by transverse cuts incising the pronator quadratus; the tongue clipped across the apex, both eyes blinded by transverse knife cuts across the cornea and striking through the anterior chamber and crystalline lens.”

  “You—she’s had all that done to her, an’ you’re going to converse with her?” the boy asked incredulously. “Don’t you mean—”

  “I mean precisely what I say, mon vieux,” de Grandin told him positively. “I shall ask her certain questions, and she shall answer me. Come, make haste, or it may be too late.”

  AT THE HOSPITAL, DE Grandin, aided by a wondering nurse and intern, removed the old Italian woman’s make-shift bandages from the girl’s severed wrists, applied a strong anodyne liniment of aconite, opium and chloroform, and wound fresh wrappings on the stumps with the speed and skill of one who served a long and strenuous apprenticeship in trench dressing-stations and field hospitals.

  Some time elapsed before the strong narcotic soup administered by the old Italian lost its effect, but at length the patient showed slight signs of consciousness.

  “Ma fille,” de Grandin said, leaning forward till his lips were almost against the maimed girl’s bandaged face, “you are in great trouble. You are temporarily deprived of speech and sight, but it is necessary that you tell us what you can, that we may apprehend those who did this thing to you. At present you are in Mercy Hospita
l, and here you will be given every care.

  “Attend me carefully, if you please. I shall ask you questions. You shall answer me by spelling. Thus”—he seated himself at the foot of the bed and placed his hand lightly on the blanket where her feet lay—“for a you will move your foot once, for b twice, and so on through the alphabet. You understand?”

  A pause, then a slight movement underneath the bedclothes, twenty-five twitches of the foot, then five, finally nineteen: “Y-e-s.”

  “Très bon, let us start.” Drawing a notebook from his pocket he rested it upon his knee, then poised a stylographic pen above it. “Leave us, if you will, my friends,” he ordered. “We shall be better if alone.

  “Now, ma pauvre?” he turned toward the mutilated girl, ready to begin his interrogatory.

  Something like an hour later he emerged from the sickroom, tears gleaming in his eyes and a taut, hard look about his mouth. “It is finished—done—completed,” he announced, sinking wearily into a chair and in defiance of every house rule drawing out an evil-smelling French cigarette and setting it alight.

  “What’s finished?” I demanded.

  “Everything; all!” he answered. “My questioning and the poor one; both together. Name of a miracle, I spoke truth when I told her that blond lie and said her loss of sight and speech was temporary, for now she sees and sings in God’s own Paradise. The shock and loss of blood she suffered were too much—she is gone.”

  He drew a handkerchief from his cuff and wiped his eyes, then: “But not until she told me all did she depart,” he added fiercely. “Give me a little time to put my notes in order, and I shall read them to you.”

  Three-quarters of an hour later he and I, Costello and Renouard were closeted in the superintendent’s office.

  “Her name was Veronica Brady,” he began, referring to his transcript of the notes he had taken in the dead girl’s room, “and she lived beneath the hill the other side the convent. She was an operative in the Hammel factory, and was due at work at slightly after seven. In order to arrive in time she had to take an early bus, and as the snow was deep, she set out early to meet the vehicle on the highway. As she was toiling up the hill this morning, she was attracted by a group of people skirting the convent wall, a woman and three men. The woman was enveloped in some sort of long garment—it seemed to her like a blanket draped round her—and seemed struggling weakly and pleading with the men, two of whom pushed and drove her onward, like a beast to slaughter, while the third one walked ahead and seemed to take no notice of the others.