“And now, Monsieur, s’il vous plait!” With an agile leap de Grandin crossed the grave, drew back his sawed-off shotgun and brought its butt-plate down upon Karl’s head.
“Good heavens, man, have you gone crazy?” I demanded as the youngster slumped down like a pole-axed ox.
“Not at all, by no means; otherwise, entirely, I assure you,” he answered as he gazed down at his victim speculatively. “Look to Mademoiselle, if you will be so kind; then help me carry this one to the motorcar.”
Clumsily, I drew the scarlet ballgown over Greta’s shoulders, then grasped her underneath the arms, stood her on unconscious feet a moment and let the garment fall about her. She was scarcely heavier than a child, and I bore her to the car with little effort, then returned to help de Grandin with Karl Pettersen.
“What ever made you do it?” I demanded as we set out for my office.
Pleased immensely with himself, he hummed a snatch of tune before he answered: “It was expedient that he should be unconscious at this time, my friend. Undoubtlessly he followed Mademoiselle Greta from the dance, saw her light the candles and disrobe herself, then show the bleeding stigma of the witch. You heard what he cried out?”
“Yes.”
“Très bon. They love each other, these two, but the memory of the things which he has seen tonight would come between them and their happiness like a loathsome specter. We must eliminate every vestige of that memory, and of the wound she dealt him, too. But certainly. When they recover consciousness I shall be ready for them. I shall wipe their memories clean of those unpleasant things. Assuredly; of course.”
“How can you do that?”
“By hypnotism. You know I am an adept at it, and these two, exhausted, all weakened with the slowly leaving burden of unconsciousness, will offer little opposition to my will. To implant suggestions which shall ripen and bear fruit within their minds will be but child’s play for me.”
We drove along in silence a few minutes; then, chuckling, he announced: “Tiens, she is the lucky girl that Jules de Grandin is so clever. Those other ones were not so fortunate. There was no Jules de Grandin to rescue Sarah Spotswood from her fate, nor the others, either. No. The same process was beginning in this case. First came a feeling of aversion for her lover, a reluctance to embrace him. That was the will of wickedness displacing her volition. Then, all unconsciously, she struck him with a knife, but the subjugation of her will was not complete. The will of evilness forced her hand to strike the blow, but her love for him withheld it, so that he suffered but a little so small scratch.”
“Do you mean to tell me Kristina Friebergh was responsible for all these goings-on?” I asked.
“No-o, I would not say it,” he responded thoughtfully. “I think she was a most unfortunate young woman, more sinned against than sinning. That sacré petit chat—that wicked little cat-thing—was her evil genius, and that of Sarah Spotswood and the other girls, as well as Mademoiselle Greta. You remember Monsieur Friebergh’s story, how his several times great-uncle found the little Kristina trying to force her way into the flames which burnt her parents, with a little kitten clutched tight in her arms? That is the explanation. Her parents were undoubtlessly convicted justly for the crime of witchcraft, and the little cat-thing was the imp by which they worked their evil spells. When they were burnt, the cat-familiar lingered on and attached itself to their poor daughter. It had no evil work to do, for there is no record that Kristina indulged in witchery. But it was a devil’s imp, instinct with wickedness, and her very piety and goodness angered it; accordingly it brought her to a tragic death. Then it must find fresh source of nourishment, since witches’ imps, like vampires, perpetuate themselves by sucking human blood. Accordingly it seized on Sarah Spotswood as a victim, and took her blood and sanity, finally her life. For half a century it lived on the vitality it took from that unfortunate young woman, then—pouf!—another victim suffers, goes insane and dies. Each fifty years the process is repeated till at last it comes to Mademoiselle Greta—and to me. Now all is finished.”
“But I saw you toss a stone at it last night without effect,” I argued, “yet tonight—”
“Précisément. That gave me to think. ‘It can make a joke of ordinary missiles,’ I inform me when I saw it let the stone I threw pass through its body. ‘This being so, what are we to do with it, Jules de Grandin?’
“‘Phantoms and werewolves which are proof against the ordinary bullet can be killed by shots of silver,’ I reply.
“‘Very well, then, Jules de Grandin,’ I say to me; ‘let us use a silver bullet.’
“‘Ha, but this small cat-thing are an artful dodger, you might miss it,’ I remind me; so I make sure there shall be no missing. From the silversmith I get some silver filings, and with these I stuff some shotgun shells. ‘Now, Monsieur le Chat,’ I say, ‘if you succeed in dodging these, you will astonish me.’
“Eh bien, it was not I who was astonished, I damn think.”
WE TOOK THE CHILDREN to my surgery, and while I went to seek some wine and biscuit at de Grandin’s urgent request, he placed them side by side upon the couch and took his stance before them.
When I tiptoed back some fifteen minutes later, Greta lay sleeping peacefully upon the sofa, while Karl was gazing fascinated into Jules de Grandin’s eyes.
“. . . and you will remember nothing but that you love her and she loves you, Monsieur,” I heard de Grandin say, and heard the boy sigh sleepily in acquiescence.
“Why, we’re in Doctor Trowbridge’s surgery!” exclaimed Greta as she opened her eyes.
“But yes, of course,” de Grandin answered. “You and Monsieur Karl had a little, trifling accident upon the road, and we brought you here.”
“Karl dear”—for the first time she seemed to notice the scratch upon his neck—“you’ve been hurt!”
“Ah bah, it is of no importance, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin told her with a laugh. “Those injuries are of the past, and tonight the past is dead. See, we are ready to convey you home, but first”—he filled the glasses with champagne and handed them each one—“first we shall drink to your happiness and forgetfulness of all the things which happened in the bad old days.”
Children of the Bat
JULES DE GRANDIN BEAT his hands together softly in perfunctory applause as the slim young bubble-dancer, birth-nude save for a liberal application of pearl powder, poised on slender, painted toes an instant with the shimmering thirty-inch rubber balloon forming a pellucid barrier between her nakedness and the audience, then ran lightly as a wind-blown thistle-fluff from the semi-lighted dance quadrangle framed by the rows of tables.
“Parbleu,” he murmured with a grin, “facilities for studying anatomy have been enlarged since you and I were at l’école de médecine, n’est-ce-pas, my friend?”
With the deftness of much practise he maneuvered the cherry at the bottom of his old-fashioned cocktail onto the flange of his muddler and raised it to his lips as a Chinaman might raise rice upon his chopsticks. He ruminated on the candied fruit a moment, washed it down with the cocktail’s final draft and turned his eyes again toward the dancing-floor, where an amber spotlight’s shaft stabbed through the violet darkness as the orchestra began to play a waltz tune softly.
Memories of moonlit straw-rides, of college proms and midwinter cotillions came to me as I recognized the gliding melody of Sobre las Olas, but no partners at a college hop or ballroom German of my dancing-days ever matched the couple who flowed out upon the floor. The man was tall and slim, virtually hipless in his molded evening clothes, with a tiny wisp of black mustache and gleaming hair pomaded and stretched back so tightly from his brow that it almost seemed to make his eyeballs pop. The girl was gold and cinnabar and ivory. Her hair, cut in a rippling shoulder-bob, was a mixture of pale gold and red, and the spotlight which played on her made it glimmer like a cataract of coruscating molten metal. Her gown of uncut velvet was brilliant yellow-red, throat-high in front, backless to the waist behind,
and slit to the knee at either side to show the gleam of slender, sleekly depilated legs. Mandarin rouge was on her cheeks and lips, the filbert-shaped nails of her hands and feet were lacquered bright vermilion, her spool-heeled sandals were of gilded leather. The oval face, long-lashed blue eyes and provocative red mouth were perfect, yet her vibrant youthfulness was overlaid with a veneer of hardness. The girl had lived and looked at life, not always in its most alluring aspects.
Their dance was neatly executed but purely routine. Turn followed pirouette and lift succeeded turn in an acrobatic version of the waltz, and applause was merely courteous in volume when the couple paused at length and made their salutations to the audience.
The music muted to a slow, soft, sobbing undertone, and a purl of babbling conversation had began to buzz as the dancers turned to leave the floor. I looked about the darkened cabaret, searching for our waiter. A final drink of Dubonnet, the check, then home seemed the best immediate program, for I had an appendectomy at seven the next morning. The servitor had lost himself among the tables, according to the habit of his kind, and I half rose from my chair to get a better vision, when my glance strayed upward to the entrance stairway. Framed against the silken hangings of vermilion, multi-folded by reflections of opposing gilt-framed mirrors, stood a woman.
So startling was the silhouette she made that she seemed to be a figure out of allegory, Perhaps Lachesis grown weary of her task of measuring the thread of human destiny. Tall she was, and slender, an aureole of old-world glamor hovering round her; black hair shining smoothly back from a forehead of magnolia-white, wide-set black eyes beneath black-penciled brows, lips full and red and richly curved, a little mocking, more than a little scornful. Her gown was midnight velvet, its somberness lightened only by a diamond buckle at her belt, and, molding shapely hips, fell swirling down about the brocade sandals on her long and narrow feet. As she threw her velvet evening wrap back from her shoulders it seemed to spread and billow between her outstretched arms, and I had the momentarily unpleasant impression that her graceful shoulders were adorned with sable bat-wings.
“Mon Dieu!” de Grandin’s exclamation called my wandering attention to the dance floor; “she is distrait, she is unwell, she swoons, my friend!”
The little danseuse’s glance had caught the woman at the stairhead as she rose from her deep curtsy, and the set, professional smile faded from her features as though wiped away. A sudden deathly pallor spread across her face, making the vermilion rouge stand out in shocking contrast, like an undertaker’s pigments on the features of a corpse. She paused abruptly, seemed to shiver as though chilled, then sank down to the floor, not in a toppling faint, but with a kind of slow deliberation which reminded me of the collapse of something formed of wax when heat is applied to it. Yet it was not an ordinary fainting fit which bore her down; rather, it seemed to me, she groveled on the polished floor in utter self-abasement, like a dog which, caught in fault, pleads with its master to withhold the whip.
As her dancing-partner raised her in his arms and bore her to the dressing-rooms the orchestra burst out into a fox trot, trumpets and saxophones bellowing the melody, piano, bass viol and drums beating the rhythm, and in a moment the sharp whisper of the dancers’ sliding feet mingled with the jungloid music and the cachinnation of high, half-drunken laughter to drown out the memory of the girl’s indisposition.
“Doctor,” Mike Caldes, proprietor of La Pantoufle Dorée, tiptoed to our table, “will you step back to th’ dressin’-rooms? Rita’s pretty sick an’ we’d like to keep th’ customers from knowin’ it, so—”
“Of course, immediately; at once,” de Grandin whispered. “We observed her difficulty, my friend, and were about to offer our assistance when you came.”
THE DANCER RITA LAY upon the couch in her narrow, cell-like dressing-room, and one look at her convinced us that she suffered from a case of paralyzing shock. Her face was absolutely colorless, her skin was utterly devoid of warmth, and tiny nodules of horripilation showed upon her forearms. When she sought to speak, an ululating groan was all that issued from between her writhing lips, for the muscles of her throat were contracted nearly to the choking-point by the globus hystericus; in a moment she was trembling in a spasm of uncontrollable successive shudders, while her eyeballs rolled back underneath the lids till the pupils disappeared, leaving but a line of oyster-white framed by her lashes.
“Has she got an epileptic fit, Doc?” Caldes asked. “Th’ dirty little double-crosser told me she was strong an’ healthy; now she goes an’—”
“Be silent,” ordered Jules de Grandin, “it is not epilepsy, but hysteria. She has been badly frightened, this one. Hasten, if you please, Monsieur, and bring us brandy and a pan of boiling water and some towels. Be quick; we wait on you, but not with patience.”
Quickly he wrung the steaming towels out, enveloped them in dry cloths and placed them on the trembling girl’s neck, wrists and feet. This done, he wrapped her in a blanket and proceeded to administer the brandy by the spoonful till the tremors passed and her eyelids slowly lowered.
A little moan escaped her as her tautened nerves relaxed and the anesthesia of sleep came on. “What is it, Mademoiselle?” he asked, bending till his car lay nearly level with her lips.
“La—La Murciélaga,” she responded sleepily. “La—Mur—” her whisper trailed to silence and her bosom fluttered with a tired sigh as she sank into unconsciousness.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he responded with a shrug. “Perhaps a line of chorus from some song. They say absurd things at such times, my friend.
“She should be recovered in an hour, at most,” he told Caldes as he rose and slipped his dinner jacket on. “Let someone sit with her until she has regained her strength; then see that she goes home. She must not dance again tonight.”
“O.K., Doc; much obliged,” responded Caldes. “I’ll see she’s taken care of.” But the greedy gleam between his heavy lids served notice that the girl would carry out her schedule on the dance floor if her partner had to bear her in his arms.
I MIGHT HAVE BEEN ASLEEP an hour when the fretful rattle of the bedside telephone awakened me. “Hullo, Doctor Trowbridge, sor,” a richly brogued Hibernian voice announced, “this is Detective Sergeant Costello. Will ye an’ Doctor de Grandin be afther comin’ to th’ Pantuflay Dory on th’ run, sor? I’ll take it kindly if ye will.”
“Come where?” I answered sleepily.
“Th’ Pantuflay Dory, sor. Mike Caldes’ joint. There’s all hell to pay here an’ no pitch hot.”
“What’s happened?”
“’Tis a pore young gur-rl’s been murthered, sor; kilt dead entirely by a gang o’ sacrilegious haythens, an’—can ye come at onct, sor? Ye’ll be interested; leastwise, Doctor de Grandin will.”
De Grandin joined me as I drove the car from the garage. He had not waited to don shirt and collar, but had wound a mauve silk scarf around his neck and tied it ascot fashion, then slipped his jacket over his pajamas. As he climbed into the motor he was busy teasing needle-points upon the tips of his small blond mustache.
“Who is it who is done to death?” he asked. “In what manner was the killing done?”
“You know as much as I,” I answered as we slid into the street, and, headlights blazing, rushed across town to the Pantoufle Dorée.
COSTELLO HAD NOT MADE an overstatement when he told me that the murder was the work of “sacrilegious haythens.”
The door communicating from the outer lobby to the club’s wide entrance stairs was built of heavy mortised timbers—a relic of the Prohibition days when ax-armed raiders might swoop down upon the place unheralded—and these were overlaid with a smooth coat of bright vermilion lacquer on which were painted golden dragons in the Chinese manner. Bone-white against this brilliant background, crucified with railway spikes, hung the naked body of a girl. From nail-pierced hands and feet small rivulets of bright-red blood writhed down like ruby-colored worms
. In haste, perhaps, the slayers had neglected to strip off both her sandals, so that one foot showed gilt cross-straps on each side of the cruel spike which held it to the painted door, while the other was unclothed except for the stigmata of bright blood which ran down from the pierced instep.
In the orange glow of a great Chinese lantern she hung against the red and golden panels in a hush of horror; yet she made a picture of appealing, tragic beauty. Her long, slim limbs, the slender waist, the hips which swelled in gracious curves, were beautiful as anything shaped by a master sculptor. Her breasts, drawn upward by the outstretched arms, were lovely as twin hemispheres of alabaster jeweled with coral. Her head had fallen forward in the utter flaccidness of death, and the fine, bright hair cascaded downward from her brow, veiling the horror of half-closed, glazing eyes and limp lips fallen open.
Upon the Peking-blue of the rich Chinese rug spread on the floor before her the sandal she had lost gleamed emptily upon its side, its buckle broken, its golden heel and instep straps ripped almost clear away from the gilt sole. Somehow, death seemed incongruous here. In this resort of opulent magnificence, this temple dedicated to enjoyment of the vanities of life, death was as out of place as a murder scene injected in a Johann Strauss operetta. An odd place, surely, for a woman to be crucified!
De Grandin stood before the lovely, piteous crucifix, arms akimbo, blond mustache a-twitch. “When did you find her?” he demanded of Costello.
“We didn’t, sor,” the Irishman replied. “Th’ watchman o’ th’ place ran onto ’er whilst he wuz makin’ his rounds a little afther three o’clock. He came a-runnin’ like the divil’s self wuz afther him, an’ bawled his sthory to the desk sergeant down at Number Three; so they sends a harness bull around here to invistigate, an’ rings th’ homicide squad at headquarters. Gilligan an’ I gits detailed to th’ job, an’ th’ first thing I does when I sees how things is, is to ring fer you an’ Doctor Trowbridge, sor.”
A Rival from the Grave Page 43