The Best of Jules de Grandin

by Seabury Quinn

  “Précisément, Monsieur,” de Grandin agreed with a thoughtful nod. “I did but ask for verification. This may have some bearing on that which may develop later, though I hope not. What next, if you please?”

  Young Tanis shook his head as though to clear an unhappy memory from his mind. “Just one thought kept dinning in my brain,” he continued. “‘Sonia is dead—Sonia is dead!’ a jeering voice seemed repeating endlessly in my ear. ‘She called on you for help and you failed her!’ By the time we arrived at the censor’s bureau I was half mad; by luncheon I had formed a resolve. I would visit Saint Sébastien that night and take farewell of my dead sweetheart—she whom Fouchet had called my morte amoureuse.

  “The light mist of the morning had ripened into a steady, streaming downpour by dark; by half-past eleven, when my fiacre let me down at Saint Sébastien, the wind was blowing half a gale and the rain drops stung like whip-lashes as they beat into my face beneath the brim of my field hat. I turned my raincoat collar up as far as it would go and splashed and waded through the puddles to the pentice of the tiny chapel beside the cemetery entrance. A light burned feebly in the intendant’s cabin, and as the old fellow came shuffling to open the door in answer to my furious knocks, a cloud of super-heated, almost fetid air burst into my face. There must have been a one per cent concentration of carbon monoxide in the room, for every opening was tightly plugged and a charcoal brazier was going full blast.

  “He blinked stupidly at me a moment; then: ‘M’sieur l’Americain?’ he asked doubtfully, looking at my soaking hat and slicker for confirmation of his guess. ‘M’sieur has no doubt lost his way, n’est-ce-pas? This is the cemetery of Saint Sébastien—’

  “‘Monsieur l’Americain has not lost his way, and he is perfectly aware this is the cemetery of Saint Sébastien,’ I assured him. Without waiting for the invitation I knew he would not give, I pushed by him into the stuffy little cabin and kicked the door shut. ‘Would the estimable fossoyeur care to earn a considerable sum of money—five hundred—a thousand francs—perhaps?’ I asked.

  “‘Sacré Dieu, he is crazy, this one,’ the old man muttered. ‘Mad he is, like all the Yankees, and drunk in the bargain. Help me, blessed Mother!’

  “I took him by the elbow, for he was edging slowly toward the door, and shook a bundle of hundred-franc notes before his staring eyes. ‘Five of these now, five more when you have fulfilled your mission, and not a word to anyone!’ I promised.

  “His little shoe-button eyes shone with speculative avarice. ‘M’sieur desires that I help him kill some one?’ he ventured. ‘Is it perhaps that M’sieur has outside the body of one whom he would have secretly interred?’

  “‘Nothing as bad as that,’ I answered, laughing in spite of myself, then stated my desires baldly. ‘Will you do it, at once?’ I finished.

  “‘For fifteen hundred francs, perhaps—’ he began, but I shut him off.

  “‘A thousand or nothing,’ I told him.

  “‘Mille tonnerres, M’sieur, you have no heart,’ he assured me. ‘A poor man can scarcely live these days, and the risk I run is great. However,’ he added hastily as I folded the bills and prepared to thrust them back into my pocket, ‘however, one consents. There is nothing else to do.’ He slouched off to a corner of the hut and picked up a rusty spade and mattock. ‘Come, let us go,’ he growled, dropping a folded burlap sack across his shoulders.

  “The rain, wind-driven between the leafless branches of the poplar trees, beat dismally down upon the age-stained marble tombs and the rough, unsodded mounds of the ten-year concessions. Huddled by the farther wall of the cemetery, beneath their rows of ghastly white wooden signboards, the five- and three-year concessions seemed to cower from the storm. These were the graves of the poorer dead, one step above the tenants of the Potter’s Field. The rich, who owned their tombs or graves in perpetuity, slept their last long sleep undisturbed; next came the rows of ten-year concessionaires, whose relatives had bought them the right to lie in moderately deep graves for a decade, after which their bones would be exhumed and deposited in a common charnel-house, all trace of their identity lost. The five-year concessionnaires’ graves were scarcely deeper than the height of the coffins they enclosed, and their repose was limited to half a decade, while the three-year concessions, placed nearest the cemetery wall, were little more than mounds of sodden earth heaped over coffins sunk scarce a foot underground, destined to be broken down and emptied in thirty-six months. The sexton led the way to one of these and began shoveling off the earth with his spade.

  “His tool struck an obstruction with a thud and in a moment he was wrenching at the coffin top with the flat end of his mattock.

  “I took the candle-lantern he had brought and flashed its feeble light into the coffin. Sonia lay before me, rigid as though petrified, her hands tight-clenched, the nails digging into the soft flesh of her palms, little streams of dried blood running from each self-inflicted wound. Her eyes were closed—thank heaven!—her mouth a little open, and on her lips there lay a double line of bloody froth.

  “‘Grand Dieu!’ the sexton cried as he looked past me into the violated coffin. ‘Come away, quickly, M’sieur; it is a vampire that we see! Behold the life-like countenance, the opened mouth all bloody from the devil’s breakfast, the hands all wet with human blood! Come, I will strike it to the heart with my pickax and sever its unhallowed head with my spade, then we shall fill the grave again and go away all quickly. O, Sainte Vierge, have pity on us! See, M’sieur, I do begin!’ He laid the spur-end of his mattock against Sonia’s left breast, and I could see the flimsy crêpe night robe she wore by way of shroud and the soft flesh beneath dimple under the iron’s weight.

  “‘Stop it, you fool!’ I bellowed, snatching his pickax and bending forward. ‘You shan’t—’ Some impulse prompted me to rearrange the shroud where the muddy mattock had soiled it, and as my hand came into contact with the beloved body I started. The flesh was warm.

  “I thrust the doddering old sexton back with a tremendous shove and he landed sitting in a pool of mud and water and squatted there, mouthing bleating admonitions to me to come away.

  “Sinking to my knees beside the grave I put my hand against her breast, then laid a finger on her throat beneath the angle of the jaw, as they’d taught us in first-aid class. There was no doubt of it. Faint as the fluttering of a fledgling thrust prematurely from its nest and almost perished with exposure, but still perceptible, a feeble pulse was beating in her breast and throat.

  “A moment later I had snatched my raincoat off, wrapped it about her, and, flinging a handful of banknotes at the screaming sexton, I clasped her flaccid body in my arms, sloshed through the mud to the cemetery wall and vaulted over it.

  “I found myself in a sort of alley flanked on both sides by stables, a pale light burning at its farther end. Toward this I made, bending almost double against the driving rain in order to shield my precious burden from the storm and to present the poorest target possible if the sexton should procure a gun and take a pot-shot at me.

  “It seemed as though I waded through the rain for hours, though actually I don’t suppose I walked for more than twenty minutes before a prowling taxi hailed me. I jumped into the vehicle and told the man to drive to my quarters as fast as his old rattletrap would go, and while we skidded through the sodden streets I propped Sonia up against the cushions and wrapped my blouse about her feet while I held her hands in mine, chafing them and breathing on them.

  “Once in my room I put her into bed, piled all the covers I could about her, heated water and soaked some flannel cloths in it and put the hot rolls to her feet, then mixed some cognac and water and forced several spoonfuls of it down her throat.

  “I must have worked an hour, but finally my clumsy treatment began to show results. The faintest flush appeared in her cheeks, and a tinge of color came to the pale, wounded lips which I’d wiped clean of blood and bathed in water and cologne when I first put her into bed.

  �
��As soon as I dared leave her for a moment I hustled out and roused the concierge and sent her scrambling for a doctor. It seemed a week before he came, and when he did he merely wrote me a prescription, looked importantly through his pince-nez and suggested that I have him call next morning.

  “I pleaded illness at the bureau and went home from the surgeon’s office with advice to stay indoors as much as possible for the next week. I was a sort of privileged character, you see, and got away with shameless malingering which would have gotten any other fellow a good, sound roasting from the sawbones. Every moment after that which I could steal from my light duties at the bureau I spent with Sonia. Old Madame Couchin, the concierge, I drafted into service as a nurse, and she accepted the situation with the typical Frenchwoman’s aplomb.

  “It was September before Sonia finally came back to full consciousness, and then she was so weak that the month was nearly gone before she could totter out with me to get a little sunshine and fresh air in the bois. We had a wonderful time shopping at the Galleries Lafayette, replacing the horrifying garments Madame Couchin had bought for us with a suitable wardrobe. Sonia took rooms at a little pension, and in October we were—

  “Ha, parbleu, married at last!” Jules de Grandin exclaimed with a delighted chuckle. “Mille crapauds, my friend, I thought we never should have got you to the parson’s door!”

  “Yes, and so we were married,” Tanis agreed with a smile.

  The girl lifted her husband’s hand and cuddled it against her cheek. “Please, Donald dear,” she pleaded, “please don’t let Konstantin take me from you again.”

  “But, darling,” the young man protested, “I tell you, you must be mistaken.

  “Mustn’t she, Doctor de Grandin?” he appealed. “If I saw Konstantin fall before a firing-party and saw the corporal blow his brains out, and saw them nail him in his coffin, he must be dead, mustn’t he? Tell her she can’t be right, sir!”

  “But, Donald, you saw me in my coffin, too—” the girl began.

  “My friends,” de Grandin interrupted gravely, “it may be that you both are right, though the good God forbid that it is so.”

  4. Menace Out of Bedlam

  Donald and Sonia Tanis regarded him with open-mouthed astonishment. “You mean it’s possible Konstantin might have escaped in some mysterious way, and actually come here?” the young man asked at last.

  The little Frenchman made no answer, but the grave regard he bent on them seemed more ominous than any vocally expressed opinion.

  “But I say,” Tanis burst out, as though stung to words by de Grandin’s silence, “he can’t take her from me. I can’t say I know much about such things, but surely the law won’t let—”

  “Ah bah!” Inspector Renouard’s sardonic laugh cut him short. “The law,” he gibed, “what is it? Parfum d’un chameau. I think in this country it is a code devised to give the criminal license to make the long nose at honest men. Yes.

  “A month and more ago I came to this so splendid country in search of one who has most richly deserved the kiss of Madame Guillotine, and here I catch him red-handed in most flagrant crime. ‘You are arrest,’ I tell him. ‘For wilful murder, for sedition and subornation of sedition and for stirring up rebellion against the Republic of France I make you arrested.’ Voilà.

  “I take him to the Ministry of Justice. ‘Messieurs,’ I say, ‘I have here a very noted criminal whom I desire to return to French jurisdiction that he may suffer according to his misdoings.’ Certainly.

  “Alors, what happens? The gentlemen at the Palais de Justice tell me: ‘It shall be even as you say.’

  “Do they assist me? Hélas, entirely otherwise. In furtherance of his diabolical designs this one has here abducted a young American lady and on her has committed the most abominable assault. For this, say the American authorities, he must suffer.

  “‘How much?’ I ask. ‘Will his punishment be death?’

  “‘Oh, no,’ they answer me. ‘We shall incarcerate him in the bastille for ten years; perhaps fifteen.’

  “‘Bien alors,’ I tell them, ‘let us compose our differences amicably. Me, I have traced this despicable one clear across the world, I have made him arrested for his crimes; I am prepared to take him where a most efficient executioner will decapitate his head with all celerity. Voilà tout; a man dies but once, let this one die for the crime which is a capital offense by the laws of France, and which is not, but should be capital by American law. That way we shall both be vindicated.’ Is not my logic absolute? Would not a three-year-old child of most deficient intellect be convinced by it? Of course; but these ones? Non.

  “‘We sympathize with you,’ they tell me, ‘but tout la même he stays with us to expiate his crime in prison.’ Then they begin his prosecution.

  “Grand Dieu, the farce that trial is! First come the lawyers with their endless tongues and heavy words to make fools of the jury. Next comes a corps of doctors who will testify to anything, so long as they are paid. ‘Not guilty by reason of insanity,’ the verdict is, and so they take him to a madhouse.

  “Not only that,” he added, his grievance suddenly becoming vocal again, “they tell me that should this despicable one recover from his madness, he will be discharged from custody and may successfully resist extradition by the Government of France. Renouard is made the fool of! If he could but once get his hands on this criminal, Sun Ah Poy, or if that half-brother of Satan would but manage to escape from the madhouse that I might find him unprotected by the attendants—”

  Crash! I ducked my head involuntarily as a missile whistled through the sleet-drenched night, struck the study window a shattering blow and hurtled across the room, smashing against the farther wall with a resounding crack.

  Renouard, the Tanises and I leaped to our feet as the egg-like object burst and a sickly-sweet smell permeated the atmosphere, but Jules de Grandin seemed suddenly to go wild. As though propelled by a powerful spring he bounded from the couch, cleared the six feet or so separating him from Sonia in a single flying leap and snatched at the trailing drapery of her dinner frock, ripping a length of silk off with a furious tug and flinging it veilwise about her head. “Out—for your lives, go out!” he cried, covering his mouth and nose with a wadded handkerchief and pushing the girl before him toward the door.

  We obeyed instinctively, and though a scant ten seconds intervened between the entry of the missile and our exit, I was already feeling a stinging sensation in my eyes and a constriction in my throat as though a ligature had been drawn around it. Tears were streaming from Renouard’s and Tanis’ eyes, too, as we rushed pell-mell into the hall and de Grandin slammed the door behind us. “What—” I began, but he waved me back.

  “Papers—newspapers—all you have!” he ordered hysterically, snatching a rug from the hall floor and stuffing it against the crack between the door and sill.

  I took a copy of the Evening News from the hall table and handed it to him, and he fell to tearing it in strips and stuffing the cracks about the door with fierce energy. “To the rear door,” he ordered. “Open it and breath as deeply as you may. I do not think we were exposed enough to do us permanent injury, but fresh air will help, in any event.

  “I humbly beg your pardon, Madame Tanis,” he added as he joined us in the kitchen a moment later. “It was most unconventional to set on you and tear your gown to shreds the way I did, but”—he turned to Tanis with a questioning smile—“perhaps Monsieur your husband can tell you what it was we smelled in the study a moment hence.”

  “I’ll tell the world I can,” young Donald answered. “I smelt that stuff at Mons, and it darn near put me in my grave. You saved us; no doubt about it, Doctor de Grandin. It’s tricky, that stuff.”

  “What is?” I asked. This understanding talk of theirs got on my nerves.

  “Name of a thousand pestiferous mosquitoes, yes, what was it?” Renouard put in.

  “Phosgene gas—COC12” de Grandin answered. “It was among the earliest of gases use
d in the late war, and therefore not so deadly as the others; but it is not a healthy thing to be inhaled, my friend. However, I think that in a little while the study will be safe, for that broken window makes a most efficient ventilator, and the phosgene is quickly dissipated in the air. Had he used mustard gas—tiens, one does not like to speculate on such unpleasant things. No.”

  “He?” I echoed. “Who the dickens are you talking—”

  There was something grim in the smile which hovered beneath the upturned ends of his tightly waxed wheat-blond mustache. “I damn think Friend Renouard has his wish,” he answered, and a light which heralded the joy of combat shone in his small blue eyes. “If Sun Ah Poy has not burst from his madhouse and come to tell us that the game of hide-and-go-seek is on once more I am much more mistaken than I think. Yes. Certainly.”

  The whining, warning whe-e-eng! of a police car’s siren sounded in the street outside and heavy feet tramped my front veranda while heavy fists beat furiously on the door.

  “Ouch, God be praised, ye’re all right, Doctor de Grandin, sor!” Detective Sergeant Jeremiah Costello burst into the house, his greatcoat collar turned up round his ears, a shining film of sleet encasing the black derby hat he wore habitually. “We came here hell-bent for election to warn ye, sor,” he added breathlessly. “We just heard it ourselves, an’—”

  “Tiens, so did we!” de Grandin interrupted with a chuckle.

  “Huh? What’re ye talkin’ of, sor? I’ve come to warn ye—”

  “That the efficiently resourceful Doctor Sun Ah Poy, of Cambodia and elsewhere, has burst the bonds of bedlam and taken to the warpath, n’est-ce-pas?” de Grandin laughed outright at the Irishman’s amazed expression.

  “Come, my friend,” he added, “there is no magic here. I did not gaze into a crystal and go into a trance, then say, ‘I see it all—Sun Ah Poy has escaped from the asylum for the criminal insane and comes to this place to work his mischief.’ Indeed no. Entirely otherwise. Some fifteen minutes gone the good Renouard expressed a wish that Doctor Sun might manage his escape so that the two might come to grips once more, and hardly had the words flown from his lips when a phosgene bomb was merrily tossed through the window, and it was only by a hasty exit we escaped the inconvenience of asphyxiation. I am not popular with many people, and there are those who would shed few tears at my funeral, but I do not know of one who would take pleasure in throwing a stink-bomb through the window to stifle me. No, such clever tricks as that belong to Doctor Sun, who loves me not at all, but who dislikes my friend Renouard even more cordially. Alors, I deduce that Sun Ah Poy is out again and we shall have amusement for some time to come. Am I correct?”