Devil's Score: A Tale of decadent omen….

by Edouard Jourdan

  The nightmare of last night is not the first that has upset the patient to the point of pulling complaints. But at other times, Katarina merely hit the partition, or she got up in a tumult, and she found Johan awakened by the noise, rid of the dream as well as the sleep.

  With more perspicacity, she might have learned many things ... Who could say, in fact, that the previous nightmares were of a different nature than the last?

  In spite of her curiosity, Katarina hopes with all her heart that the sequence of events will not give her the opportunity to verify it. Back home, like a portrait that finds its setting, Johan, by all accounts, will undergo a metamorphosis of the happiest.

  Here are snowballs in the crystal flute he likes to see the corner of his table. On the purple background of the large lampshade, a branch of mimosa granulates a saffron that will flatter its view. Let's say, for the dear husband, the heavy silver ashtray near the Richmond cigarettes. Let's sizzle in the Javanese incense burner the mixture of gums and wood he prefers ...

  Everything is ready. The house is exquisite. Through the windows one can see the Luxembourg garden, which is covered with tender foliage; Stephen can come.

  Now, to the grace of God!

  It is useless to tire the reader by conveying it, from Luxembourg to Paris, following Madame Bansberg, and then, sixteen hours later, from Paris to Luxembourg, in the company of the interesting couple who are the subject of this story. At the risk of breaking the clock of time; to make him turn sixteen hours in sixteen seconds, it is better, it seems to me, to wait for them here, where it is captivating to see Johan return.

  Here it is. Victor, driving the limousine, stops at the edge of the sidewalk. Katarina goes down first.

  Although she has been watching all night, she shines because Johan rested like a child.

  The concierges, marveled, escort them to the elevator (once is not customary). It cannot be denied that the convalescent is reassured and that an expression of happiness illuminates his pale face, while he sets the pace of his crutches.

  Two floors. The clear walls sink vertically. The climb stops in an elastic shock. We leave.

  And now we have to open our eyes and listen.

  While Katarina presses the return button, an exclamation of Johan, deaf, restrained makes him flinch.

  What does she live? This, which terrorizes her:

  There, in the door, in the middle of the cream panel, a dagger is planted. Planted deeply. What we see of the blade is covered with blood. A red net flows from there like a wound, bright purple on the ivory of the varnish, and - tiny detail, formidable event - the handle of the knife is encrusted with a number ... "666"!

  Just as held catatonic by an unnamed fright, Johan has the face of a buried, and Katarina fails. Mysterious eyelids, which are not hers, fall on her eyes (or is it the night that suddenly comes like a cloud?). Everything darkens for her. Only the panel cuts a blinding rectangle; and, rising out of the opaque material, as a diver ascends to the surface of the water, a shadowy man emerges from this blindness, surrounded by a dazzling line, straightened to its full height, his arms cross as an inexorable guardian. The knife pierces his heart.

  With a nervous effort, more painful than a muscular restoration performed at the edge of an abyss, Katarina is overcome. It's only time! Someone is coming inside the house. The other wing opens wide on the valet.

  "Demonoplasm" dissipates immediately.

  Alexander, the valet, who heard the lift, came from himself where his service calls him. His mistress advances: he must not see the knife!

  Johan understood. While Katarina blocks the passage and masks the view, he grabs the weapon, pulls it and steals it in the pocket of his jacket.

  What does all this mean? ...

  A kind of complicity now connects Katarina to her husband. Will he finally explain himself? ... He is still silent.

  O flowers! Perfumes! Trinkets! Arrangements that are welcome! Prepared harmony that is only a sweet welcome! We do not notice you. We do not even know that we are at home.

  Katarina does not dare to question Johan. She pushed him into the smokehouse. He mechanically took a cigarette, and smoked in haste.

  - Take off your coat, will you?

  - Bah! I have the time. We freeze here.

  He smokes. He is annoyed. Better to leave him alone for a moment.

  As well, there is something to do without delay.

  A blind man would hear nothing. She enters the antechamber, rubberizing her steps, felting her poor little company ...

  From a single wet towel rub, the fillet of blood disappeared from the cream panel. It remains, to commemorate the macabre incident, that this slot is not very visible. A putty ball would stop it. And so, what? Nobody will suspect that it was made by a bloody dagger, marked by a strange number!

  Nobody saw the knife. The concierge was warned. Besides, the blood was still liquid. This proves that the door was offended very shortly before the arrival of the Bansbergs. The perpetrator, his coup perpetrated, had to hide on the upper floors and come down as soon as possible ...

  Katarina, looking at burning the bloody towel, was thinking.

  So, now, "Demonoplasm" was recovering from the game! Once more, after a long eclipse, Saint Maur's death had intervened in Johan's life ... A rather indescribable tumult swirled under the thinker's forehead. But, as we know, she was not a woman to be caught without green.

  A crime? A crime in the house? It was possible. She did not believe it, though. She believed rather in a sign, a warning, an artificial omen. The diabolical character of the adventure struck her. One of two things: either the knife had been thrust into the door by some Apache imbued with sub-literature, or "Demonoplasm" was better than a helpless ghost, better than a scarecrow brandished in our world by an underground hand. And it had to be admitted that the apparition of this dead man, making his chest coincide with the knife, was not without disturbance.

  Moreover, this sinister knife, marked with the number "666", this knife identical to that of the nightmare, did not reveal two mysterious and additional correlations: one between nightmare and reality, the other between Johan and "Demonoplasm"?

  A crime in the house? Unlikely. We would see.

  Meanwhile, the most elementary prudence required that silence be kept, at least until evening.

  - Johan, give me your jacket!

  "There," he said. I'm starting to warm up.

  No more blood on his hands than on Aristide's. He had already removed all traces of the episode.

  Katarina herself takes the jacket. She searches her pockets ... No knife.

  When she returned to the smoker, Johan was no longer there. She followed him at a distance, hoping, because of the piano, that he would cross the salon without stopping.

  He stopped, propped up on his crutches.

  She watched him behind a curtain of gold cloth, passionately wishing that he would be content to look at the pretty half-mourning of the decoration, the memorial palms and the ribbon knots where his sad eyes seemed to read eternal Regrets and Requiescat in pace, the piano black and long as a catafalque ...

  He approached the silent coffin that contained the entire music. He caressed it, like the dress of a thoroughbred brown bay, the lacquered luster ...

  Katarina refrained from appearing, dragging her away ... Alas! today or tomorrow, the time of the piano would sound fatally!

  But now Johan was lifting the lid of the keyboard ... Why shudder behind the golden curtain? Why, madly, wondering what was under the lid? ...

  Thank God! it was really ordinary touches.

  Johan said in a whisper:

  - It would take an extension ...

  It's his right leg that no longer reaches the pedal.

  Lord! Johan sitting at the piano! ... that she thought she would lose forever! Johan on the piano! ... Ah! he is really only himself in this place, adjusted to the marvelous object, like a cleverly designed human piece!

  His features have the hardnes
s of an alabaster mask like found on old temples. He put his hands on the keys.

  With one finger, one shy finger, he spells out the typical sentence of this fantasy of

  Liszt, the last thing he did ...

  As a linear drawing evokes the colors and all the magic of a well-known painting and that it indicates, the Hungarian motif makes think of all the magic of all the masterpiece. The notes, which are timidly spaced, awaken the clandestine harp that the piano conceals. Harmonics sing to distant sonorous, like zephyrs at the bottom of a sacred wood. They contain the abundance of the musical poem. A changing chord plays out like a scarf in the breeze. It curls around the conductive theme and a garland around some thyrsi. The symphony is there; she advanced behind the silence, ready to leap, to spin, dancing and magnificent, mad and divine. Johan feels her with flesh, who wants to escape from his hands. Katarina already hears it.

  Bansberg's hands are rushing! ...

  There is no longer any enlightened pianist who is ready to attack brilliantly the “Hungarian Fantasia” for piano and orchestra. There is only one man crying in the arms of a painful woman.

  The silence is terrible.

  Somewhere, a glasswork breaks

  Johan closed the piano like a beer on a beloved corpse.

  A crime in the house?

  The next morning, Katarina asked what she wanted to know.

  All the tenants of the building were present in Paris; none of them had complained of anything. The concierges, adroitly solicited, did not show that they had noticed, the day before, in passing, one or more suspicious individuals. There remained, then, to study, in the order of the possible, the familiar of the house and, in the first place, the servants of the Bansbergs.

  Katarina was sure of them. Alexander, Johan's former brush man, and Esther, his wife, were the types of the faithful valet and the devoted maid. Cecile, the superabundant cook, would not have betrayed more; not that she proved to her masters an unalterable attachment, but her corpulence and the mildness of her manners had ridiculed all accusations of Machiavellian exploit.

  Innocent certainly, it was necessary that the three servants undergo an interrogation. Perhaps from their statements would he come out some teaching.

  Katarina, after having matured her system of investigation - which was rudimentary - made them all appear at the same time.

  Cecile wiped her pudgy paws with her blue apron, and smelled of fish like a big mermaid, because this was a Friday. She was majestic, scarlet, and shining. "Magdeburg," so called M. de Varmand, because, he said, of his hemispheres; and that made the vast girl laugh inconsiderately, like a traveling charcuterie whose merchandise flickers and jumps at the bumps of the pavement.

  Beside her, Alexander and Esther looked like two half-creatures, like two pounds of weight next to a kilo.

  Katarina assured her voice and said to them:

  "An evil madman has planted a dagger-or some blade-in the front door, if I judge by the slit I noticed there, which was not there the day before yesterday.

  But neither of them had heard anything, nothing noticed. No ranger. No beggar. No one had come between the departure of Madame and the return of Monsieur and Madame. "A violent blow? No, ma'am, and yet the galley is not far from the entrance. "But," said Alexander, "the door may have been ruined by gently throwing the tool into it, weighing on it; and it would not make any noise. "

  Katarina, on the other hand, gathered some tendentious opinions on the lawyer above and the industrialist below. Finally, she knew that the servants at the service of the other tenants were "all the best people".

  Alexander, Esther and Cecile could not provide further information.

  It was thin. Katarina was pitifully astonished at not being able to go back from the bloody knife to the hand of her possessor, by a series of these deductions or rigorous inductions familiar to the detectives of the book or the screen. Everything was scattered, everything was hidden! She could not narrow the circle of her research, which until now had encompassed the immense universe!

  And yet she did everything she could do! No darkness that she had not polled since the catastrophe!

  Thus, this dead woman whom she called "Demonoplasm" (ah, what was he dead, exactly, had the tamponade killed only a corpse?) Well! this death, it was really not Katarina's fault if she still did not know her identity! She had obtained the official and complete list of the victims of the disaster, and little by little she came to know each deceased, his being, his profession, his past. She arrived there alone, refusing to resort to private espionage services. But these dead, there were seventy-three! The task was long, and Johan absorbed most of his attention ... Ah! if only this one (no, no, he would not have hurt a fly!) A sweet, a harmless! Him, shed blood! Never!) if only that one was more expansive! If it were allowed to question him! If M. de Varmand, on the other hand, was not so eccentric and so sarcastic! ...

  Katarina leaned in discouragement. She nevertheless took stock of her situation.

  But the assets of his knowledge amounted to zero.

  Then she perceived, shuddering, that she had kept records only of the possible account, and that during these times the impossible account had been enriched by such an imposing capital, to the detriment of the other, that It was seriously deficient.

  8 – OBSESSION

  Katarina had been accompanied to Dr. Petiot by M. de Varmand.

  The man of science listened to him, sitting behind a desk whiter than an altar dedicated to the Moon and better equipped with various accessories than that of a New York businessman.

  - ... We had just returned home that he went to the piano. He cannot play anything. And it's been three days since I know what to do. He is silent, fierce, absent. Nothing interests him. He thinks, that's all. It cannot last. We run to the abyss ... So, I came to find you. It is necessary, it is absolutely necessary to leave it from there! You have to give him back his talent, by any means. Do the impossible. Try everything that is humanly possible. At least give him some hope. Help him recover the ease and agility of his hands, even if we know it's a pipe dream!

  Petiot, leafing through a directory with one hand, seized a telephone speaker on the other:

  - Hello! ... Bring me the card LB 27 352 pink. Then he said:

  "I do not think, little Madame, that Mr. Johan Bansberg will ever become the great pianist he once was. I told you so and I repeat it with pain, although I know how much you want me to tell you the opposite, even at the price of a half-mast ...

  He was interrupted by a barely audible electric crackle. The surgeon touched one of the contacts of the small desk-board on the side of his desk. There was a click outside the room; a door opened, giving passage to the secretary of Petiot and revealing the word "Enter! "Written on the other side, in incandescent letters. The letters went out when the master's finger had left the contact.

  The secretary put a pink card LB 49.177475,6.553597 on the desk.

  "Here, Madam," said the surgeon, "this is the state of Mr. Bansberg's hands, when you did me the honor of entrusting me with his life. Read yourself.

  Left hand first: fracture of the carpus and metacarpus, phalanges inflammation, rupture of extensors and flexors, sectioning of the supinator, contusion of the thenar eminence, crushing of the abductor, lumbrical and interosseous, hemorrhagic hand veins, multiple bruises ...

  And there was so much for the right hand!

  The typewritten words ranged a collection of pain that Katarina was more or less clearly represented, given the hostility of the vocabulary, but which gave her the impression of crushed hands, boned, skinned. And she saw Johan's dreadful sight stranded in the limo during the night of the disaster.

  - Starting point! muttered M. de Varmand, who detailed the writing with a grimace.

  - Is not it, sir? Petiot agreed.

  The Marquis went on, addressing Katarina:

  - In these conditions, it is a miracle that Johan can use his hands as he does. We cannot ...

  "We can try
," said the surgeon. We can help nature and even guide its task. I thought I ought to make you feel the difficulty of the cure; now, however improbable the success, I cannot refuse to afford you the means. Moreover, in the event that these means do not result in the physical result we seek, they would none the less have the most salutary moral effect. That hope is reborn in the mind of Mr. Johan Bansberg, it is, Madam, as you have felt, the capital point. Hope, occupation, the incessant pursuit of a long-desired goal is health, it is life.

  - I did not ask anything else! said Katarina, quite happy.

  Petiot had taken a sheet of letterhead and wrote his prescription:

  - Let's see, we say ... Three divisions: massage, gymnastics, electrotherapy. Japanese masseuse: Miss Otsuki. Swedish Gymnastics: Yijnof Manual. Electrotherapy ... Do you naturally have electricity at home? Good. I will order what you need at Fralquin.