Run Afoul

by Joan Druett

  There was movement on one of the benches near the back, and Wiki turned around, along with everyone else. Lieutenant Forsythe, wearing dress uniform and an extremely forbidding expression, stood up.

  “You know Mr. Tweedie?”

  “I’ve consulted with him in the past,” Forsythe admitted, and sat down quickly, forestalling any questions about the nature of the illness.

  Dr. Vieira de Castro looked at Dr. Olliver again, and said, “And Dr. Tweedie sold you the bark you needed?”

  “And opium, too,” Dr. Olliver said. “The patient was very irritable, and I attributed his slow recovery to his choleric temper. I also asked Dr. Tweedie to make up a bottle of a bismuth preparation—mistura bismuthi cum soda et tragacanth, to be exact—as his indigestion had persisted.”

  “And after you returned to your patient?”

  “He improved so well that when Captain Wilkes issued instructions for a survey of the marine life in the harbor, I decided that it was safe to leave him.” Dr. Olliver sighed deeply, and said, “I greatly regret that I was proved so wrong.” He paused, and then added, “The subject had made some wild accusations, but I’d paid little attention. As I said before, he was a man of irritable temper.”

  “Accusations? What kind of accusations?”

  “He raved about a conspiracy to kill him.”

  There was an instant hubbub, while those who could not understand English asked for translations from their more knowledgeable neighbors, and other men called out for an explanation. The clerk hammered on the desk, and slowly silence returned.

  “And did the deceased name the members of this conspiracy?”

  Dr. Olliver looked at Wiki, and said, “While he mostly pointed the finger at the cook, Robert Festin, he named Wiki Coffin, too.”

  Another commotion, silenced with more hammering. Wiki stood up again, and waited. The coroner surveyed him curiously, and then queried, “Why did the deceased think you wanted to kill him?”

  Wiki shrugged. “He accused me of wanting to get rid of him so I could have our cabin all to myself—though, as it happened, he was the one who was unhappy that we were sharing a stateroom.”

  “But why should he feel that way?”

  “He was frightened of New Zealand Maori.”

  “Meu Deus, a sério?” Dr. Vieira de Castro was quite astounded. Then he looked thoughtful, and remarked, “Well, your people do have an ominous reputation for cannibalism, I suppose.” Wiki kept an impassive silence, and when Dr. Castro inclined his head, he sat down.

  Dr. Vieira de Castro looked at Dr. Olliver again, and the surgeon said, “Mr. Grimes also accused the steward, Jack Winter.”

  “Why, is he a New Zealand Maori, too?”

  “No, but he was the man who carried the fish into the cabin.”

  “So you think the fish was poisoned, Dr. Olliver?”

  “As Wiki Coffin said, the rest of us ate it with no ill effects—though there is the slight chance that the top two fish, which were the ones the deceased ate, might have been polluted with something. Personally, I had perfect trust in the steward—so much so that the subject, most unfortunately, was in his entire care at the time that he died.”

  Silence fell as everyone took in the implications of what the surgeon had said, so complete that Jack Winter’s sharp intake of breath could be heard. When he was summoned, he moved with uncharacteristic awkwardness, dropping into the witness chair with a thud after being given permission to sit.

  Dr. Vieira de Castro said, “Were you aware that the deceased considered you to be part of a murderous conspiracy?”

  Jack said defensively, “No one paid no attention to his ravings. As you said yourself, sir, if anything poisoned Mr. Grimes, then it must’ve been the pudding what Robert Festin made specially for him.”

  “But you were the one in charge of his nursing?”

  “If by nursing you mean getting medicine into him despite his wild complaints, then that’s right, sir.”

  “Dr. Olliver gave you clear instructions?”

  “There was two big bottles of medicine, and a vial of enough pills to last the time while he was away. One of the bottles held bismuth, and Dr. Olliver told me to give him a tablespoonful of that after food. The other ones he got four times a day. It worried me something horrible,” the steward said plaintively. “He was asleep mostly, but his arm twitched all the time, and he complained of pins and needles and how the medicine tasted bitter—he complained a-constant, sir, but what was I to do?”

  “Pins and needles?” Dr. Vieira de Castro looked at Wiki, and said, “What does he mean?”

  Wiki did his best to explain the term in Portuguese, and after a while the coroner understood. Then he frowned at Dr. Olliver and said, “But is that not a symptom of strychnine poisoning?”

  Dr. Olliver heaved himself to his feet and said angrily, “I assure you, sir, that the deceased never complained of anything like that to me!”

  “But it certainly indicates that strychnine was administered while you were away—that he was, in fact, being poisoned.” Dr. Vieira de Castro looked sternly at Jack Winter, and said, “What did you give the deceased to eat?”

  “I didn’t give him nothing but medicine, sir,” the steward exclaimed. “Robert Festin was the one who cooked and fed him his invalid food!” His face had gone pasty, and he was beginning to sweat.

  “Aha,” said the coroner, and consulted his notes for what seemed a very long time, while everyone waited for the accused to be called. When Dr. Vieira de Castro finally looked up, however, he merely remarked, “I think it is time that we heard from the Colonial Analyst,” and nodded to Jack Winter to stand down.

  The steward, looking shaken and somewhat baffled, returned to his seat next to Wiki, and a blond, sturdily built man took his place. In a strong accent, he attested that his name was Johan Ohlsson, and then went on to state in matter-of-fact tones that he had received a jar of human organs from the postmortem.

  Then, without needing any prompting from Dr. Vieira de Castro, he reported that he had also received the postmortem report, which had made particular remark of the congested and extremely inflamed left lung. Apart from the lung, the organs were anatomically normal, though the stomach was blackened in places by bismuth, and the liver contained a bitter substance that was probably strychnine, though the tests were inconclusive.

  “And did you test the medicines?” Dr. Vieira de Castro asked.

  “Of course,” the Colonial Analyst replied. “First, I ground up the pills, of which there were fourteen in the bottle, and which had been competently made, in my professional opinion, and finished with powdered licorice root. The resultant powder proved to contain approximately fifteen grains of chinoidine, which is a common form of Peruvian bark, one grain of piperine, two and one half grains of ferri pulvis, one grain of gentian root, and four grains of opium.”

  Delivered in a thick accent, this was quite incomprehensible to most of the audience. Dr. Vieira de Castro, however, looked very thoughtful, indeed. He tapped the end of his pen against his lips, and then said, “Were any toxins present?”

  “None that I could ascertain.”

  “So what about the bottles of medicine?”

  There was a hushed pause as Dr. Ohlsson took out a notebook and waved away the flies that circled about his head. Then he said, “The first bottle contained carbonate of ammonia, and the second, a bismuth carbonate compound.”

  “And?”

  “I found the first free of poison.”

  Total hush, while everyone waited. Then Dr. Castro prompted, “The second?”

  “By distillation I obtained a precipitate which, when evaporated to dryness, answered all the tests distinctive of strychnine hydrochloride.”

  Blank silence, and then absolute commotion. People shouted at each other, and the clerk banged on his desk with his fist. It took a long time for the man who had risen to his feet at the back of the room to make himself noticed. Then he was heard to say, “Dr. Vieira de Ca
stro, I think I can provide an explanation.”

  “I certainly hope so, Dr. Tweedie,” said Dr. Vieira de Castro, and motioned to him to come forward.

  Apothecary Tweedie was a short man with stiff red hair which stood out all around his head. In a broad Scotch accent, he said, “As I found out only this morning, when I made up the bismuth mixture I used a contaminated mortar. A most regrettable lapse, but completely inadvertent.”

  “You—what!”

  “It was a combination of circumstances, Dr. Vieira de Castro,” said the apothecary. “Earlier the same afternoon that I made up this medicine, I was working in the factory at the back of my property. My son called to tell me that a customer wanted some strychnine for destroying mice, and when I told him to look in the bottle where we normally kept the strychnine, he said he had already looked there, but it was empty. So I went to the shop, and ground some in a mortar kept specially for such purposes, and give the customer a portion of it, putting the rest in the bottle. No sooner had I done it, than I was called back to the factory on an urgent but unrelated matter, so I left the mortar at the back of the counter, for my son to clean and put away. After that, I did not think about it anymore. About an hour later, when my son called me again, this time to tell me that Lieutenant Forsythe had brought in a customer who wished me to make up some medicine, the mortar was gone, so I assumed he had taken it away for cleaning.”

  “And what was this medicine?”

  “The lieutenant’s friend, Dr. Olliver, had two orders he wanted urgently filled. The first was for Peruvian bark, which he needed, he said, for making up pilula cinchona composita. He had the other ingredients on board, he said, but had run out of bark. Accordingly, I supplied him with chinoidine. He also consulted me about the addition of opium to the pills, and, after advising him, I sold him that, too. The second order was for a gastric sedative of compounded carbonate of bismuth. After collecting together the various ingredients—bismuth oxycarbonate, sodium bicarbonate, tragacanth flakes, and so forth—I went to the shelf where we keep the mortar for pounding medicines, took it down and used it, assuming it was the right one. Unfortunately, as we found today, it was the same mortar that had been used to grind up the strychnine.”

  “Meu Deus!” Dr. Vieira de Castro shook his head in horror, and said, “How did this unfortunate blunder come about?”

  “I have no idea. My son says that though he hadn’t had a chance to clean the mortar I used to grind the strychnine, he had put it back in its proper place. When we checked this morning, however, we found it on the wrong shelf. Regrettably, the traces of strychnine left in the mortar must have polluted the medicine.”

  “Traces,” said Dr. Vieira de Castro thoughtfully. There was dead silence in court. Everyone watched him as he studied his folded hands. Then he looked up again, and said to the analyst, “Dr. Ohlsson, how much strychnine did you find in the mixture?”

  “Perhaps one fifth of a grain per dose, Dr. Vieira de Castro.”

  “Enough to be fatal?”

  “It is very rare for even one half of a grain to prove mortal.”

  “Were there any other contributing factors?”

  “The deceased’s precarious state of health was the major feature, I believe. The left lung was adherent to the chest wall, and was congested and extensively inflamed. Though the small amount of strychnine I detected might have exacerbated the problem, the state of the left lung was sufficient to bring about a terminal crisis, to which the strychnine, though it caused unfavorable symptoms, did not contribute.”

  “So what, in your professional opinion, was the cause of death?”

  “In my professional opinion, Dr. Vieira de Castro,” Dr. Ohlsson pronounced with grave certainty, “the death was due to natural causes.”

  Twelve

  To Wiki’s surprise, when the verdict was given a cheer started up in the body of the court, swiftly quelled by the portly court officers. Then, as he followed the Acadian cook, now freed of handcuffs, through the packed room to the door, men reached out and clapped Festin on the shoulder, uttering congratulations, and calling him by affectionate names.

  More strangely still, when they came out on the plaza a dozen women of various ages swooped in on Robert Festin with cries of delight. Two of the women seemed particularly ecstatic, smothering his face with kisses. They were obviously mother and daughter, both full breasted, and with clouds of black hair and flashing black eyes. Though the daughter would undoubtedly be as fat as her mother in another few years, Wiki thought she was extremely beautiful. However, as they carried Robert off, the look the Acadian cast back at Wiki was unmistakably desperate.

  Wiki stood watching Festin and his ardent aficionadas disappear, feeling most mystified. While he’d known that the cook had shipped on board the sealing vessel in Rio de Janeiro, he had not given much thought to what kind of life he had passed here—or even whether he’d been here any significant time, as it had seemed so likely that he was just another transient sailor.

  “So, who the devil is he?” he asked the men around him, and, as everyone vied to talk the loudest, he learned that Festin was a celebrated chef—the genius behind the far-famed table of a restaurant called the House of the Ewer! When he had arrived back in town in handcuffs—accused of poisoning!—it had been the sensation of the year. It was inconceivable that Maestro Festin’s food would give even the most delicate stomach the slightest difficulty! Grandees paid magnificent sums to the House of the Ewer to borrow him for their banquets—so would he poison a man? Unthinkable!

  Not only that, the gossip ran on, but Robert Festin was destined to become a substantial man. The daughter of the House of Ewer was determined that she would marry him, and him alone. It was a romantic affair! Tragically, though, he had been kidnapped, and put on board some departing ship. Some said that the poor fellow was suffering from the effects of a knock on the head, and undoubtedly, if so, he had sustained this blow during the abduction, did not Senhor Coffin agree?

  “Perhaps,” said Wiki, frowning. While the mystery of why the courtroom had been packed with spectators was solved, the discovery that Robert Festin was locally famous raised interesting questions about the inquiry itself. He craned to look over the heads of the crowd, but Dr. Gilchrist was nowhere to be seen. He was anxious to talk to Lieutenant Forsythe, too, but the southerner had also vanished.

  Finally, one whiskery fellow produced a gap-toothed, meaningful grin, pointed over one shoulder, and indicated that the big lieutenant had left early in the proceedings, muttering that he needed a drink. Damn, thought Wiki, remembering the hundreds of tabernas in the maze of stone-paved alleys between the Praça da Constituição and the waterfront, but nonetheless he set off.

  Within moments, he was hemmed in by squat, solid buildings, their frames built of great wooden beams, which were filled in with roughly squared stones. These had been cemented into place with clay, and then plastered over and washed with a variety of pastel colors. Their roofs jutted out, hiding most of the sky overhead, and were heavily tiled with terra-cotta. All the shops were open-fronted, strung with ropes of garlic and onion, and packed with tables loaded down with goods that included sweets and fruit and pastries. The wrought-iron balconies of the living quarters above the stores were hung with bright fabrics. Showy Brazilian soldiers and drunken foreign sailors jostled on the narrow sidewalks, growling at each other like dogs, while barefooted slaves undulated through the throng with tall water jars on their heads, on their way to or from the nearest public fountain.

  Wiki paused to buy a bunch of ripe bananas from a passing fruit seller. It was growing late, and he was hungry, but still he kept up the search. He had just about run out of likely places when he finally tracked down his quarry in an alley off the big market at Rua Ouvidor. The dark, smoky interior of the tavern, ancient enough to be decorated with frescoes on the plastered walls, was packed with carousing sailors, mostly Englishmen from the British man-of-war. When Wiki asked for Forsythe by name, several pointed to t
he courtyard outside, where Wiki found the southerner drinking in a corner behind the privy.

  The lieutenant was alone, slumped on a bench with his elbows on the table, his tattooed arms curved around a pitcher of fiery local aguardiente. His coat and hat were tossed onto the bench beside him, and a branch of purple bougainvillea dangled bizarrely over his head. There were just a few other men in the yard. One of them was lying in the tiny fountain in the middle, in imminent danger of drowning, so Wiki lifted him out with a fist in his collar, and deposited him dripping on the cracked flagstones. Then he walked over to Forsythe’s table.

  The southerner betrayed no amazement at all when he looked up and saw him, instead waving a beefy hand at the bench opposite, and pushing the pitcher toward him. He didn’t look surprised, either, when Wiki shook his head and called for hot coffee. Instead, he turned his mouth down when the serving maid brought it at the run, commenting sourly that he never got that kind of attention.

  “That’s because I’m better looking than you are,” Wiki complacently informed him, and offered him a banana, which was rudely refused. Peeling one for himself, he said, “Did you know that Robert Festin is famous around here?”

  “Famous?”

  Wiki told Forsythe the story. “So when he absconded onto the sealing schooner he was running away from a woman, huh?” the southerner said at the end, and enjoyed a hearty guffaw. “So what else happened after I left?”

  “When did you leave?”

  “Right after that cold-blooded little Swede started on about human organs. Bloody repulsive, I thought, enough to turn a normal man’s stomach.” Forsythe picked up the pitcher and took a swig. Rather a lot dripped down his shirtfront, and Wiki realized that he was drunker than he looked.

  “You didn’t think you might be called up for more testimony?”

  “Nope.” Then Forsythe asked rather aggressively, “Why would they want to question me some more, anyways?”

  “Your apothecary friend, Dr. Tweedie, gave some rather startling evidence after you had gone, and the coroner might have wanted to cross-examine you about it.”