The Nickel Man

by Brian Stableford

  Furthermore, they were approaching their goal. The path climbed up with abrupt bends, suspended on the flank of a mountain overhanging a deep and sheer ravine. Dusk had arrived and the moon was at the zenith, over the narrow fissure that some Roland’s sword had carved into the mountain. The men were marching behind their mules, slowly but at a steady pace, without breathing more rapidly.

  Unlike them, Bémolisant did not have legs hardened to that kind of exercise; he rubbed his thighs and sponged his forehead, looking forward to the blessed threshold where he would finally be able to get a little well-earned rest.

  It was the furious barking of half a dozen dogs that first signaled the strange little hamlet, composed of a few small huts wedged in the hollow of an overhanging rock. Through narrow and smoky windows a few rays of light filtered, which were abruptly extinguished in response to the noise, and in the darkness a voice shouted: “Who goes there?” in a tone more menacing than amicable.

  Calcadores responded in his turn with a few sonorous interjections that resembled a password, and the little troop continued to advance. While the arrieros disappeared with their mules beneath the somber arch of a portal, however, Juan told the Frenchmen to stay where they were for a minute and allow him to warn the person who was to be their host about their presence.

  Fortunately, the negotiations did not take long, and following a little old man, bent with age, who appeared to be the master of the place, Bémolisant and Pilesèche penetrated into a room of moderate size, into which people of all sorts were already crowded, some eating and drinking around a massive table, others lying down along the walls, wrapped in rags that had been cloaks, with the hoods pulled down over their eyes.

  Pilesèche advanced hesitantly, his eyes blinded by the light that suddenly struck them. The sordid room gave him the impression of a brigands’ cave, from which he had little chance of emerging alive. Meanwhile, as all eyes—and what eyes!—peered at the newcomers, the master, sitting them down at the table, pushed toward them a large loaf of black bread, already considerably eroded, and a bowl of milk full of migus—pieces of bread fried in unpurified oil—which emitted a nauseating odor of rotten olives.

  It would probably not have been a good idea to venture into that place with the air of cosseted nabobs, but our two companions did not have the look of fortunate aristocrats in quest of the unexpected, who might be robbed profitably.

  When they had attempted to appease their hunger with a few unspeakable concessions to Spanish cuisine, the two Frenchmen were taken to a corner by their aged host, who made them a speech with all the nobility of which he was capable

  “Señor Juan tells me that you desire a guide to traverse the frontier by night, and that you are counting on our help—but that is a perilous enterprise for us; how much will you pay?”

  “We still have a little money, and you can be tranquil, worthy Caballero; your recompense will be as if you had saved King Don Sancho, your august ancestor.”41 Bémolisant judged that romantic language was appropriate, and that one does not speak to a man of Navarre, however scant a hidalgo, as one speaks to a Marseille street-porter or an Auvergnat water-carrier.

  The old man allowed himself to be flattered and discussed the price of his small service. They soon fell into accord, however, and when the bargain was concluded the artist asked whether there was some shelter in which one might sleep—but the house only had that one room, and the travelers had no other recourse than to lie down in the darkest corner on the esteras—the coarse mats covering the bare ground.

  They were beginning to get drowsy, in spite of the numerous insects that took their bodies for pasture, when the sound of a guitar that was being strummed caused the artist to open his eyes.

  The spectacle was worth the trouble. Fuliginous and reeking lamps had been set on the ground which illuminated from below a tall young woman whose black hair was decked with a rose and twisted in a kiss-curl over her forehead. She adjusted her castanets and caused her satin corset to crack over her hip, as if to test the elasticity over her back.

  Along the wall, men and women were ranged, cigarettes in their lips, while a flautist played a prelude of scales on a three-holed chirola, and another musician plucked the strings of his guitar.

  Bémolisant raised his head. The mañola, hamstrings taut, launched into a zoreico, a primitive dance without attitudes, but rapid and brisk, to the accompanying rattle of the enraged castanets.

  Ah, what rhythm!

  For the moment, Bémolisant was all rhythm; he had learned rhythm on Spanish soil, where everything ends up in a bolero, and, willingly seizing a Basque drum or drawing fin-de-siècle chords from a guitar with the flight of his five thin fingers, he hammered out the victorious rhythm.

  Under the oblique glimmer of the vacillating lamps, the great shadow of the dancer elongated, capricious and fantastic, over the poorly roughcast and blackened walls. Abandoning the old rhythms, she sometimes swayed on her hips, provocative and never weary, down to the ground, her throat extended for a kiss, the suddenly reared up as if to flee, with a laugh that displayed her white teeth, and exclamations that the musicians and the audience repeated.

  The dances only ended with the exhaustion of the dancer and when the lamps went out for want of oil, but Bémolisant was already asleep again, snoring conscientiously, accompanying the last arpeggios of the guitar with a regular rhythmic purr.

  He was sleeping profoundly when a vigorous hand came to shake him by the shoulder. It was necessary to get up and set forth on the march, silently, in the dark, along narrow paths on which the feet could hardly place themselves.

  The smugglers took the lead, each one with a bale on his shoulder and a blunderbuss in his hand. The two Frenchmen brought up the rear, somewhat breathless and barely able to distinguish, under the tremulous light of the moon, the girl that the old smuggler had given them to serve as a guide, and who was marching in front of them with all the grace of her sixteen years, at a brisk pace, unhampered by her short skirt. Peppa turned round from time to time to check that they were following and to encourage them with a familiar appeal, and then she fell silent.

  Dawn paled the high summits; the path plunged down into gorges. Undoubtedly they were on the French slopes, and it was a matter of keeping out of sight of the customs officers.

  By virtue of what mischance did the band run into an ambush just as it emerged on to a small plateau on the saddle of a pass?

  In the blink on an eye the alarm was given, but it was too late to change course; they were numerous, however, and the smugglers fell upon the enemy, daggers drawn, while two of them took cover behind a rock and leveled their blunderbusses.

  Peppa, with a resolution that denoted a certain habitude to such adventures, had grabbed Bémolisant by the arm and dragged him into a clump of tall fir trees, while Pilesèche tried to follow them, bumping into branches, his footing ill-assured on the slippers needles

  The customs men were too buy fending off the Spaniards to pursue the fugitives, who hurried along, clinging on to rocks and branches.

  The sound of gunshots gradually faded away in the distance, and they finally reached a muleteer’s trail that led directly to the next village.

  Peppa, anxious about the outcome of the battle in which her people were engaged, wanted to go back, and, after giving the Frenchmen her final instructions bade them adieu and wished them a successful end to their journey.

  They were now in France, and in spite of their fatigue, hastening their pace, they resumed their route.

  XIX. The End of an Auction

  Elbows leaning on his work table and his head plunged into his open hands, Rosamour was trying to decipher a puzzle.

  He had a photographic print in front of him in which all the letters were reproduced, one after another, without any apparent connection.

  The letters, which stood out in white against the black background of the print, were, unfortunately, partly effaced, with lacunae where characters disappeared, scarcely lea
ving a nebulous trace, while the sponge that had passed over the inscription had striped it with broad milky streaks, endearing it illegible.

  The photographic paper was curling at the edges, and in order to keep it flat, Rosamour has placed the paperweight he had picked up in Monsieur Grillard’s laboratory, a nickel toad, on one edge, while a heavy ivory paper-knife maintained the opposite edge.

  The agent concentrated all his attention on the characters, which, although belonging to a familiar alphabet, were nevertheless as many hieroglyphs.

  By dint of patience, however, he had succeeded in transcribing the letters that seemed indubitable and replacing by crosses those that were effaces, and had obtained the following inscription:

  bfoomgtqklu++++esqnuo

  +++agtb+++++ef++fy

  esqnugnx++++et kgn+etc+

  +gst+np+++pftofpcfyesk+

  +++++ihoskenc++tec x+

  ++dbvetvaugn ugtjpsutu++

  ++++

  His eyes fatigued by that difficult decipherment, and without allowing himself to be put off by the numerous lacunae in his transcription, the agent set about considering the physiognomy of that sequence of letters, while reflecting that the invalid must not have searched very hard for his cryptographic system and must have used the simplest.

  Following a familiar method, it was necessary to look to see whether any group of letters was reproduced several times. In fact, each of the ternaries esq, qnu and yes was reproduced twice. After that, it was necessary to test whether the cryptogram might have been composed simply by means of a key of three letters or numbers. Rosamour thus began to separate the letters into groups of three, taking account as much as possible of the effaced characters.

  If his hypothesis was correct, each of those groups of characters ought to correspond to the key—which is to say that all the first letters of the various groups came from the same alphabet; in the same way, all the second letters had been formed by a second alphabet, and similarly for the third.

  Having separated out the list of first letters he looked to see which one was repeated most frequently; it was e. Now, in French—as in the majority of European languages, in fact—it is e that is most frequently repeated letter; it followed that the first letters of the groups had not been subject to any alteration.

  It was different for the other two series of letters; in the second, the f was most frequently repeated, and in the third it was g, which indicated that the e of the natural language was indicated in one case by f and in the other by g. Now, e f and g follow one another in the ordinary alphabet, so the key to the ternary might be 123, indicating that the second letter was displaced by one rank and the third by two.

  Nothing was simpler. The clever fellow shrugged his shoulders before such ingenuity, and reproached himself for not having searched sooner for what the document might contain, which he swiftly transcribed as follows:

  Bemoletpilt...erontco…meta... ee..evrnotev... esixm.. sa.. ess. mor… perienceveri…... heoriem… redu… datestamentetinstru……

  Alas, alas! The puzzle was still as puzzling as it had been before the decipherment.

  A few words were easy to recognize; firstly there was a question of Bemol… and Pil…; the word mort—death—was recognizable, and testament. Experience—experiment—was also definable, but what experiment? And did the letters veri, which followed it, mean that the experiment verified the (t)heorie: the theory?

  “Good,” said the agent. “Monsieur Grillard carried out an experiment that might lead to his death. He mentions his testament and his instructions. But all that doesn’t say a great deal, and certainly isn’t sufficiently explicit...”

  After reflection and with a significant grimace, he added: “It doesn’t explain anything at all. As many question marks as before! I really can’t present myself armed with this incomplete and incoherent cryptogram.”

  Again he plunged his head into his hands, his eyes obstinately fixed on those shreds of phrases, whose image was dancing in his congested brain, his nerves taut to the point of exasperation, while his temples were throbbing.

  The truncated words filed past before his eyes, and he completed them with the most bizarre assemblages. He read in them whatever he wished, instantly demolishing what he had painstakingly edified, without, alas, the help of logic. He adapted new syllables to them, trying the most unusual combinations, but it was all devoid of meaning, and his overheated imagination, drawing away from the immediate goal, went back to the beginning of the most mysterious and bizarre affair that he had ever encountered.

  He saw himself before the magistrate again; he saw himself, presumptuous and sure of is method, the scientific method. “The fugitives,” he had said, “I have at the end of a telegraphic wire…the key item of evidence, the cadaver—doubtless a cadaver—I shall envelop with my tightest deductions: it can’t escape me...”

  But the fugitives were at the bottom of the sea!

  And the cadaver was still undiscoverable!

  Finally, he saw himself in the home of the young widow, whose dolor had moved him from the start, and whose gentle face haunted him more than was reasonable now.

  Abruptly his thought found a bifurcation there, and set off along the flowery paths of idyll. The career that he had embraced had brought him nothing but disappointments; lassitude took hold of him; he dreamed of a tranquil life in perfumed fields. A farm by the seaside, with a discreet and tender housewife, children playing barefoot in the grass...

  His dream came back to the young woman whose sad eyes had troubled him so much. Was she not the good farmer’s wife he needed?

  And why not?

  The satisfactions that the poor woman had found with her first husband would not leave her eternal regrets, and since Bémolisant was dead—oh, quite dead, since the sea does not yield its prey—it was quite permissible to dream of a new union in which they would both be perfectly happy...

  Eyes half-closed, Rosamour let his domestic fantasy run down that slope, and smiled, as of the odorous breeze was already rustling the foliage in his orchard, in the midst of which the image of Hélène floated.

  And it went on…and on…when his gaze, staring, encountered the piece of paper again—the infernal piece of paper that retained the indecipherable mystery.

  Suddenly plunged back into reality, he felt a surge of irresistible anger rising within him. Oh, the idyll was a long way off. The professional gripped him again...

  What! There was an obstacle that he could not overcome! A grain of sand, a mere nothing, was stopping him!

  He stood up, furiously, pushing back his armchair, and started pacing pack and forth. The carpet stifled the noise of his footfalls, which hit the floor violently, but he talked aloud, hurling insults at people and things, insulting himself, showing his fist to the four walls…

  It was, in brief, one of those sudden fits of anger that serve as a safety-valve for our irascible machine, and which rise, and rise, with an increasing din, until the final explosion...

  It did not help him to decipher the cryptogram. But it relieved all his slowly-accumulated frustrations.

  The objects that came to hand flew across the room, and, finally seizing the little nickel toad that was holding down the photographic print, he hurled it at the floor in its turn, violently...

  But what the…?

  It seemed that the impact had animated the metal!

  The stunned toad hopped, awkwardly throwing itself between Rosamour’s legs—who, opening his eyes wide, moved his feet out of the way to avoid the contact of the disgusting creature.

  What a singular dream! Was he going mad?

  And abruptly, he brought his heel down on the gray back of the toad, which he crushed with a curt sound. But immediately, recovering possession of himself, passing his hand over his forehead to drive away the last residues of anger, he leaned over his victim and examined it,

  The animal had shiny metal scales on its back, and on the carpet lay a thin envelope of nickel. The paperweight
had merely been an animal imprisoned within a frail pellicle of metal.

  Suddenly, light dawned in his brain, illuminating an entire sheaf of facts incomprehensible until then. The statue! Why should the statue not also be the chrysalis of a living being?

  Was not the experiment to which the cryptogram referred the metallization of a human being? And had not the two supposed criminals fled, frightened by the horrible operation in which they had doubtless collaborated?

  But is not the most urgent thing to go and rid the man who was buried alive of the rigid envelope that enclosed his body? A cadaver, evidently…for a human being does not have the strength of resistance of a vulgar toad. The crucial piece of evidence is there; it will be revealed at the propitious moment, and will display the flair and science of the detective.

  Damnation! The statue is about to be sold at auction, with the aid of a great reinforcement of advertising that does honor to the ingenuity of Jean Saure, the fin-de-siècle journalist. Imagine the face of the buyer!

  And Rosamour arranges in his imagination an entire spectacular coup de théâtre, for the public exhibition, in the midst of which he will cry: “Stop! You’re buying a statue and you’re being given a man. A man can’t be sold—there’s an error in the merchandise! Rosamour is a great detective!”

  Content with that discovery, the agent picket up his cane and his hat, and went out to go see Madame Bémolisant, whom it was necessary to tranquillize.

  The young woman was accustomed to seeing in him an amiable savior, and had conceived a grateful sympathy for him. When he appeared, it was like a ray of sunshine that suddenly illuminated her sad interior. She often invited him to dinner; he was so cheerful, so full of delicate attentions for Madame Legris, who was quite delighted by them, and even for the baby, which he dandled on his knees—with the consequence that he had gradually introduced himself into the life of the widow, and his presence was desired when it was anticipated.