“Now, Dei gratia, we shall succeed!” the Frenchman whispered as he turned the body on its face and knelt over it, applying his hands to the costal margins, bearing down with all his might. There was a gentle, sighing sound, as of breath slowly exhaled, and Aksakoff went pale as death.
“She lives!” he whispered. “O Nikakova, lubimuimi moï, radost moya—”
I felt a sob of sympathy rise in my throat. Too often I had heard that vital simulation when air was forced between a corpse’s lips by sudden pressure. No physician of experience, no morgue attendant, no embalmer can be fooled by that. . . .
“Mordieu, I think . . . I think—” de Grandin’s soft, excited whisper sounded from the bed. He had leant back, releasing pressure on the corpse, and as he did so I was startled to observe a swelling of the lower thorax. Of course it could be nothing but mechanical reaction, the natural tendency of air to rush into an emptied space, I told myself, but . . .
He bent forward swiftly, pushing down upon the body with both hands, retained the pressure for a moment, then swung back again. Forward—back; forward—back, twenty times a minute by the swiftly clicking second hand of his wrist watch he went through the movements of the Schaefer method of forced respiration, patiently, methodically, almost mechanically.
I shook my head despairingly. This hopeless labor, this unfounded optimism . . .
“Quick, quick, my friend, the supradrenalin!” he gasped. “Put fifteen minims in the syringe, and hurry, if you please. I can feel a little, so small stirring here, but we must perform a cardiocentesis!”
I hastened to the surgery to prepare the suprarenal extract, hopeless as I knew the task to be. No miracle of medicine could revive a woman dead and buried almost twenty years. I had not spent a lifetime as a doctor to no purpose; death was death, and this was death if I had ever seen it.
De Grandin poised the trocar’s point against the pallid flesh beneath the swell of the left breast, and I saw the pale skin dimple, as though it winced instinctively. He thrust with swift, relentless pressure, and I marveled at the skill which guided pointed, hollow needle straight into the heart, yet missed the tangled maze of vein and artery.
Aksakoff was on his knees, hands clasped, eyes closed, prayers in strangled Russian gushing from his livid lips. De Grandin pressed the plunger home, shooting the astringent mixture deep into a heart which had not felt warm blood in half a generation.
A quick, spasmodic shudder shook the pallid body and I could have sworn I saw the lowered eyelids flutter.
The Frenchman gazed intently in the calm, immobile face a moment; then: “Non?” he whispered tensely. “Pardieu, I say you shall! I will it!”
Snatching up a length of sterile gauze he folded it across her lightly parted lips, drew a deep breath and laid his mouth to hers. I saw his temple-veins stand out as he drained his lungs of air, raised his head to gasp more breath, then bent and breathed again straight in the corpse’s mouth. Tears stood in his eyes, his cheeks seemed losing every trace of color, he was becoming cyanotic. “Stop it, de Grandin!” I exclaimed. “It’s no use, man, you’re simply—”
“Triomphe, victoire; succès!” he gasped exultantly. “She breathes, she lives, my friends; we have vanquished twenty years of death. Embrasse-moi!” Before I realized what he was about he had thrown both arms around me and planted a resounding kiss on both checks, then served the Russian in like manner.
“Nikakova—Nikakova, radost moya—joy of life!” sobbed Aksakoff. The almost-golden lashes fluttered for an instant; then a pair of gray-green eyes looked vaguely toward the sobbing man, unfocussed, unperceiving, like the eyes of new-born infants struggling with the mystery of light.
It was impossible, absurd and utterly preposterous. Such a thing could not have happened, but . . . there it was. In the upper chamber of my house I had seen a woman called back from the grave. Sealed in a tomb of ice for almost twenty years, this woman lived and breathed and looked at me!
PHYSICALLY SHE MENDED RAPIDLY. We increased her diet of albumins, milk and brandy to light broth and well-cooked porridges in two days. She was able to take solid food within a week; but for all this she was but an infant magnified in size. Her eyes were utterly unfocussed, she seemed unable to do more than tell the difference of light and shade, when we spoke to her she gave no answer; the only sounds she made were little whimpering noises, not cries of pain or fear, but merely the mechanical responses of vocal cords reacting to the breath. Two nurses were installed and de Grandin scarcely left her side, but as the time drew out and it became increasingly apparent that the patient whom he nursed was nothing but a living organism without volition or intelligence, the lines about his eyes appeared more deeply etched each day.
A month went by without improvement; then one day he came fairly bouncing in to the study. “Trowbridge, mon vieux, come and see, but step softly, I implore you!” he commanded, clutching at my elbow and dragging me upstairs. At the bedroom door he paused and nodded, smiling broadly, like a showman who invites attention to a spectacle. Aksakoff knelt by the bed, and from the piled-up pillows Nikakova looked at him, but there was nothing infantile about her gaze.
“Nikakova, radost moya—joy of life!” he whispered, and:
“Serge, my love, my soul, my life!” came her murmured answer. Her pale hands lay like small white flowers in his clasp, and when he leant to her, her kisses flecked his cheeks, his brow, his eyelids like lightly fluttering butterflies.
“Tiens,” de Grandin murmured, “our Snow Queen has awakened, it seems; the frosts of burial have melted, and—come away, my friend; this is not for us to see!”
He tweaked my sleeve to urge me down the hall. The lovers’ mouths were joined in a fierce, passionate embrace, and the little Frenchman turned away his eyes as though to look on them were profanation.
NIKAKOVA SEEMED INTENT ON catching up the thread of interrupted life, and she and Serge with de Grandin spent long hours shopping, going to the theatre, visiting museums and art galleries or merely taking in the myriad scenes of city life. The semi-nudity of modern styles at first appalled her, but she soon revised her pre-war viewpoint and took to the unstockinged, corsetless existence of the day as if she had been born when Verdun and the Argonne were but memories, instead of in the reign of Nicholas the Last. When she finally had her flowing pale-gold hair cut short and permanently waved in little tight-laid poodle curls she might have passed as twin to any of a million of the current crop of high school seniors. She had an oddly incomplete mode of expression, almost devoid of pronouns and thickly strewn with participles, a shy but briar-sharp sense of humor, and an almost infinite capacity for sweets.
“No, recalling nothing,” she assured us when we questioned her about her long interment. “Drinking laudanum and saying good-bye to my Serge. Then sleep. Awaking finds Serge beside me. Nothing more—a sleep, a waking. Wondering could death—true death—be that way? To fall asleep and wake in heaven?”
As soon as Nikakova’s strength returned they were to go to China where Serge’s business needed personal direction, for now he had recovered his belovèd the matter of accumulating wealth had reassumed importance in his eyes. “We suffered poverty together; now we shall share the joy of riches, radost moya,” he declared.
DE GRANDIN HAD GONE to the county medical society, where his fund of technical experience and his Rabelaisian wit made him an always welcome guest. Nikakova, Aksakoff and I were in the drawing-room, the curtains drawn against the howling storm outside, a light fire crackling on the hearth. She had been singing for us, sad, nostalgic songs of her orphaned homeland; now she sat at the piano, ivory hands flitting fitfully across the ivory keys as she improvised, pausing every now and then to nibble at a peppermint, then, with the spicy morsel still upon her tongue, to take a sip of coffee. I watched her musingly. Serge looked his adoration. She bore little semblance to the pale corpse in its icebound coffin, this gloriously happy girl who sat swaying to the rhythm of her music in the glow of the piano lamp. S
he wore a gown of striped silk that flashed from green to orange and from gold to crimson as she moved. It was negligible as to bodice, but very full and long of skirt. Brilliants glittered on her cross-strapped sandals, long pendants of white jade swayed from her ears.
In the trees outside, the wind rose to a wail, and a flock of gulls which flew storm-driven from the bay skirked like lost souls as they wheeled overhead. A mile away a Lackawanna locomotive hooted long and mournfully as it approached a crossing. Nikakova whirled up from her seat on the piano bench and crossed the room with the quick, feline stride of the trained dancer, her full skirt swirling round her feet, the firelight gleaming on her jewel-set sandals and on brightly lacquered toenails.
“Feeling devils,” she announced as she dropped upon the hearth rug and crouched before the fire, chin resting in her palms, her fingers pressed against her temples. “Seeming to hear zagovór—’ow you call heem?—weetches’ spell-charm? On nights like this the weetches and the wairwolves riding—dead men coming up from graves; ghosts from dead past flocking back—”
She straightened to her knees and took a match-box from the tabouret, bent a match stave till it formed an L turned upside down and drove the end of the long arm into the box top. Breaking off another stave to make it match the first in height, she stood it with its head against that of the upturned L, then pressed her cigarette against the touching sulfurous heads.
“Now watching!” she commanded. A sudden flare of flame ensued, and as the fire ran down the staves the upright match curled upward and seemed to dangle from the crossbar of the L. “What is?” she asked us almost gleefully.
“The man on the flying trapeze?” I ventured, but she shook her head until her ear-drops scintillated in the firelight.
“But no, great stupid one!” she chided. “Is execution—hanging. See, this one”—she pointed to the fire-curled match—“is criminal hanged on gibbet. Perhaps he was—”
“A Menshevik who suffered justly for his crimes against the People’s Revolution?” Softly pronounced, the interruption came in slurring, almost hissing accents from the doorway, and we turned with one accord to see a man and woman standing on the threshold.
He was a lean, compactly put together man of something more than medium height, exceedingly ugly, with thin black eyebrows and yellowish-tinted skin. His head was absolutely hairless, yet his scalp had not that quality of glossiness we ordinarily associate with baldness. Rather, it seemed to have a suède-like dullness which threw no answering gleam back from the hall lamp under which he stood. His small, side-slanting eyes were black as obsidian and his pointed chin thrust out. His companion wore a blue raincoat, tight-buttoned to the throat, and above its collar showed her face, dead-white beneath short, jet-black hair brushed flat against her head. Her brows were straight and narrow, the eyes below them black as prunes; her lips were a thin, scarlet line. She looked hard and muscular, not masculine, but sexless as a hatchet.
I saw terror like cold flame wither my companions’ faces as they looked up at the trespassers. Although they said no word I knew the chill and ominous foreknowledge of sure death was on them.
“See here,” I snapped as I rose from my chair, “what d’ye mean by coming in this way—”
“Sit down, old man,” the woman interrupted in a low, cold voice. “Keep still and we’ll not hurt you—”
“‘Old man?’ I choked. To have my house invaded in this way was injury, to be called an old man—that was added insult. “Get out!” I ordered sharply. “Get out of here, or—” The gleam of light upon the visitors’ pistol barrels robbed my protest of authority.
“We have come to execute these traitors to the People’s Cause,” the man announced. “You have doubtless heard of us from them. I am Boris Proudhon, commissar of People’s Justice. This is Matrona Rimsky—”
“And you will both oblige me greatly if you elevate your hands!” Standing framed in the front door, Jules de Grandin swung his automatic pistol in a threatening arc before him. He was smiling, but not pleasantly, and from the flush upon his ordinarily pale cheeks I knew he must have hurried through the rain.
There was corrosive, vitriolic hatred in the woman’s voice as she wheeled toward him. “Bourgeois swine; capitalistic dog!” she spat, her pistol raised.
There was no flicker in de Grandin’s smile as he shot her neatly through the forehead, nor did he change expression as he told the man, “It is a pity she should go to hell alone, Monsieur. You had better keep her company.” His pistol snapped a second spiteful, whip-like crack, and Boris Proudhon stumbled forward on the body of his companion spy and fellow murderer.
“Tiens, I’ve followed them for hours,” the Frenchman said as he came into the drawing-room, stepping daintily around the huddled bodies. “I saw them lurking in the shadows when I left the house, and knew they had no good intentions. Accordingly I circled back when I had reached the corner, and lay in wait to watch them. When they moved, so did I. When they so skillfully undid the front door lock all silently, I was at their elbows. When they announced intention to commit another murder—eh bien, it is not healthy to do things like that when Jules de Grandin is about.”
“But it was scarcely eight o’clock when you went out; it’s past eleven now. Surely you could have summoned the police,” I protested. ‘Was it necessary that you shoot—”
“Not necessary, but desirable,” he interrupted. “I know what’s in your thought, Friend Trowbridge. Me, I can fairly see that Anglo-Saxon mind of yours at work. ‘He shot a woman!’ you accuse, and are most greatly shocked. Pourquoi? I have also shot the female of the leopard and the tiger when occasion called for it. I have set my heel upon the heads of female snakes. Had it been a rabid bitch I shot in time to save two lives you would have thought I did a noble service. Why, then, do you shudder with smug horror when I eliminate a blood-mad female woman? These two sent countless innocents to Siberia and death when they worked for the Tsarist government. As agents of the Soviets they fed their bloodlust by a hundred heartless killings. They murdered the great savant Pavlovitch in cold blood, they would have done the same for Nikakova and Serge had I not stopped them. Tenez, it was no vengeance that I did; it was an execution.”
Aksakoff and Nikakova crossed the room and knelt before him, and in solemn turn took his right hand and raised it to their brows and lips. To me it seemed absurd, degrading, even, but they were Russians, and the things they did were ingrained as their thoughts. Also—I realized it with a start of something like surprise—Jules de Grandin was a Frenchman, emotional, mercurial, lovable and loving, but—a Frenchman. Therefore, he was logical as Fate, He lived by sentiment, but of sentimentality he had not a trace.
It was this realization which enabled me to stifle my instinctive feeling of repugnance as he calmly called police headquarters and informed them that the murderers of Doctor Pavlovitch were waiting at my house—“for the wagon of the morgue.”
Incense of Abomination
“. . . incense is an abomination unto me.”
—Isaiah 1: 13
DETECTIVE SERGEANT COSTELLO LOOKED fixedly at the quarter-inch of ash on his cigar, as though he sought solution of his problem in its fire-cored grayness. “’Tis th’ damndest mixed-up mess I’ve iver happened up against,” he told us solemnly. “Here’s this Eldridge felly, young an’ rich an’ idle, wid niver a care ter ’is name, savin’ maybe, how he’d spend th’ next month’s income, then zowie! he ups an’ hangs hisself. We finds him swingin’ from th’ doorpost of his bedroom wid his bathrobe girdle knotted around ’is neck an’ about a mile o’ tongue sthickin’ out. Suicide? Sure, an’ what else could it be wid a felly found sthrung up in a tight-locked flat like that?
“Then, widin a week there comes a call fer us to take it on th’ lam up to th’ house where Stanley Trivers lived. There he is, a-layin’ on his bathroom floor wid a cut across ’is throat that ye could put yer foot into, a’most. In his pajammies he is, an’ th’ blood’s run down an’ spoilt ’em go
od an’ proper. Suicide again? Well, maybe so an’ maybe no, fer in all me time I’ve niver seen a suicidal cut across a felly’s throat that was as deep where it wound up as where it stharted. They mostly gits remorse afore th’ cut is ended, as ye know, an’ th’ pressure on th’ knife gits less an’ less; so th’ cut’s a whole lot shallower at th’ end than ‘twas at th’ beginnin’. However, th’ coroner says it’s suicide, so suicide it is, as far as we’re concerned. Anyhow, gintlemen, in both these cases th’ dead men wuz locked in their houses, from th’ inside, as wus plain by th’ keys still bein’ in th’ locks.
“Now comes th’ third one. ’Tis this Donald Atkins felly, over to th’ Kensington Apartments. Sthretched on th’ floor he is, wid a hole bored in ’is forehead an’ th’ blood a-runnin’ over everything. He’s on ’is back wid a pearl-stocked pistol in ’is hand. Suicide again, says Schultz, me partner, an’ I’m not th’ one ter say as how it ain’t, all signs pointin’ as they do, still—” He paused and puffed at his cigar till its gray tip glowed with sullen rose.
Jules de Grandin tweaked a needle-sharp mustache tip. “Tell me, my sergeant,” he commanded, “what is it you have withheld? Somewhere in the history of these cases is a factor you have not revealed, some denominator common to them all which makes your police instinct doubt your senses’ evidence—”
“How’d ye guess it, sor?” the big Irishman looked at him admiringly. “Ye’ve put yer finger right upon it, but—” He stifled an embarrassed cough, then, turning slightly red: “’Tis th’ perfume, sor, as makes me wonder.”
A Rival from the Grave Page 65