The Congo Venus

by Matthew Head

  “What reason did she give for that?” Miss Finney asked.

  “None!” said Madame de St. Nicaise. “But she was so stubborn! Ah, if you could have known my anxiety, but she insisted—no one but Gollmer. I said to her—to think of it now, to think that I said it to her, right then—‘Liliane,’ I said to her, ‘but this is suicide! Suicide!’ ‘I will have him,’ she said, ‘and no one else.’ So—what could I do? I called him.”

  Miss Finney sat there nodding her head like something mechanical and saying, “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm,” at regular intervals, so that she began to suggest some kind of small power device in operation to keep Madame de St. Nicaise going without loss of speed. Madame was really into her swing now, and she rattled away at a great rate, and the whole story had the sound of an exposition she had given over and over again to all listeners. But she still enjoyed giving it, and she told it with tremendous relish, although it was complete with gestures and grimaces which were supposed to indicate a wide range of emotions having to do with grief, resentment, pity, and righteous indignation.

  “And so it was Gollmer,” she said. “From the first I had presentiments of disaster. Because for a man like that to call himself a doctor is of course ridiculous—ridiculous! Now you know, Docteur Finney, for everybody knows, even we who like myself have cultivated the simplest knowledge of these tropical maladies, the simple home remedies and precautions —we all know,” and here she accentuated each word by punching a thick rigid finger against her knee, “that the quinine—may—turn—the—malaria—to—blackwater—fever. And so of course that is why I was always so careful that we should all have our pills daily, so that if the malaria came, we would be accustomed to the quinine in our systems. True? Am I not right? Of course. Oh, I can comfort myself that I did my part! And I said to Gollmer, ‘Here, Monsieur’—for I never addressed him as Docteur, never—‘here, Monsieur, here is the record of Liliane’s quinine,’ so that he could thus estimate the curative doses. And so! Even with my records, he gives her too much quinine, and—blackwater!”

  She stirred eagerly, grinding herself firmly into position again on her buttocks, and leaning forward to look intently at each of us in turn. She resettled her glance at last on Miss Finney and went on in a low, ecstatic voice: “Murder. Yes. When it is a case like that—why should I be tactful?—I say murder. I say it for one and all to hear, yes, I will say it to Gollmer himself. I say murder. For as Monsieur Tolliver says, she was a girl who was the very embodiment of health itself. Never sick, never a day—strong. As strong and healthy,” she said, and she took particular pleasure here, “as a peasant. Yes, like that. And when a man who has the temerity to call himself a doctor so treats the malaria that in a healthy peasant like Liliane the blackwater is produced—then I say it is murder, and that he is a murderer! Murderer, murderer—” and her eyes were glittering.

  I said, “But Madame de St. Nicaise, you can’t—”

  Miss Finney rose suddenly and said, “Well, we must go now, Madame. What I really need for my records of course is dosage amounts, a complete medical history, and so on. But I think we mustn’t bother you any more right now.”

  Miss Finney is usually pretty good at hiding anything she wants to hide, and she has no scruples at all about using this talent for purposes of deception, but I looked at her now and it was obvious that she was leaving because if she stayed any longer she was going to call Madame de St. Nicaise a goddam fool and a malicious gossip. Miss Finney is naturally a brightish red in the face, with a pleasant sprinkling of fairly large freckles of a darker shade, but the freckles were almost obscured now, the red of the rest of her face having grown as dark as the freckles during Madame de St. Nicaise’s peroration.

  Madame de St. Nicaise was a fool, but she wasn’t so big a fool that she couldn’t sense Miss Finney’s anger. She said, “But Madame Docteur, I told you I could not be tactful.”

  “You certainly lived up to your advance billing,” Miss Finney said bluntly.

  “I have offended you, Madame.”

  Miss Finney seemed enough relieved by the one little jet of steam she had allowed to escape, so that she was able to say with adequate aplomb, “Let’s not put it that way, Madame. Let’s say that, uh, we have confused emotional issues somewhat with scientific ones. You were very good to let me come with Monsieur Tolliver this morning, and I can get the case records for my study from Dr. Gollmer. So I will say thank you and good-by.”

  We were all standing now, and it would be hard to say which one of us was sweating hardest. Madame de St. Nicaise said with real asperity, “Of course you are quite free to go to Gollmer, Docteur Finney. But let me assure you that I am a completely reasonable woman. The science—as you say, one understands the scientific attitude. And I have every record, every notation, on temperature, and quinine dosage—everything, from the beginning to the end. I assure you, Madame, you are quite welcome to them.”

  “Well, I won’t ask you to get them now. They can wait.”

  “Very well. As you wish. You may rest certain in your mind that they are correct. Monsieur Morelli and I nursed Liliane ourselves, Madame. For twenty-four hours a day, between us. The records are the records we kept. It was certainly not easy. Monsieur Morelli was in a state of exhaustion, complete exhaustion, from the strain, and I—”

  I looked in horror as her chin began to tremble.

  “—and I,” she said, “I have not had so easy a time of it!”

  We stood speechless while Madame de St. Nicaise pulled out the handkerchief and really used it this time, blowing her nose violently. Then she caught her breath sharply a couple of times, and managed finally to say, “Pardon, Madame. I beg your pardon, all of you. Not for what I said about Gollmer. I will stick to that to the end. Brute! Brute !” She stopped again. Again she caught her breath, fighting for control, but she choked this time, and went over the edge. “Oh!” she cried, in a low half-howl, “Oh, I wish you had not come here! Go! Please go!”

  She put her hand to her mouth and broke between Miss Finney and me, and somehow she made the door to the hallway and disappeared through it. We heard her go up the stairs, rapidly, with a heavy, irregular step. We heard a door thud closed. Then we just stood there.

  “Damn!” said Miss Finney at last. “It never fails. They go and humanize themselves at the last minute and you feel like a dog.”

  Then she made a decisive movement, almost like an animal shaking itself, and the atmosphere seemed to clear a little.

  “Come on, you two,” she said, “let’s get out of here.”

  When we got outside the house, it was like breathing again after you’ve had to hold your breath too long, getting past something that smells bad.

  In the car on the way back to the hotel, because we were going there to drop Emily, we sat without speaking. We were all being extremely uncomfortable in our own ways, and the silence stretched out so long that everybody hesitated to say anything because after so much silence almost anything that was said was certain to sound inadequate.

  It was Miss Finney who broke it, first with a hmph or a kind of grunt which was half amused and half disturbed, then she said, “Well, Emily, there goes your pump-organ.”

  “Oh, I gave that up a long time ago,” Emily said, “as soon as I began to see you and Hoopie were up to something.”

  “Indeed?” said Miss Finney.

  “Indeed,” said Emily. “And you’re just taking me back to the hotel to drop me and get rid of me so you can go around meddling some more. You must think I’m awful dumb, Mary,” she said plaintively, “just because I used to be.”

  “I know what you’re after,” Miss Finney said, “but you’re not going to get it. You want to get in on this because you hope you’ll get another chance to shoot my forty-five. Well, nobody’s going to get shot this time so you might as well get that notion out of your head.” She looked at Emily with half a grin and said, “I never thought to see the day I’d be warning Emily Collins against the use of violence.�
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  “Violence or no violence,” said Emily, “I know very well what you’re up to. I’m not going to ask you any questions, I wouldn’t want to give you that much satisfaction, but what I want to know is, have you got any kind of official standing?”

  “That’s a very attractive deal on the questions,” Miss Finney said. “The answer is, no I haven’t. None whatever.”

  “Well!” said Emily.

  “Unofficially, but for general information in case by some chance some small wispy friend and fellow missionary worker of mine should let some cat out of some bag—unofficially, I’ve done what I’ve done because a friend of Dr. Gollmer’s came to me and asked me to make a statement that in my opinion Gollmer had done all a doctor could do, and that it wasn’t his fault Liliane died—that she’d had the treatment any doctor would have given her, and she’d have died under anybody else’s care just the same. For Gollmer it’s a matter of professional life and death. And I haven’t said or done a thing so far that couldn’t be explained on those grounds, if I found myself with any explaining to do.”

  “Well, I think Dr. Gollmer’s horrid,” said Emily. “Two girls at once, and all that whisky. Are you going to give him that statement?”

  “As a matter of fact, I think maybe I am, in one form or another. By the way, that was another question.”

  “Oh, Mary,” said Emily. “I’m not a baby! And I won’t be pushed off, either. If I’m going to”—and she shot me a glance, wavered for a moment, then went on—“going to do what you asked me to last night, I will ask questions. I’ll ask one right now: you’ve talked to Madame de St. Nicaise. Do you really think she killed Liliane?”

  “Yes and no,” said Miss Finney.

  Emily said, “I think you’re mean.”

  “I’m not mean,” Miss Finney said. “You wanted to know what I thought, and I told you.”

  “But it’s the most obvious thing in the world,” I said. “I’ve got it all figured out. She didn’t give Liliane quinine tablets, she gave her something else, like those bicarbonate-of-soda tablets that look just the same, the ones like Tommy Slattery’s that I took for so long, thinking I was taking quinine. She didn’t give her the quinine, just hoping she would come down with malaria.”

  “Oh, is that the way it was?” Miss Finney said.

  “It could be,” I said.

  “Why of course!” Emily chimed in. “I saw that much, and I’m not even clever.”

  I said, “And then when Liliane actually did get malaria, the dosage Dr. Gollmer prescribed was too big, because he went by those records Madame de St. Nicaise had faked and he prescribed for a system accustomed to quinine. Liliane probably hadn’t had any for a hell of a while—certainly not since she got back from South Africa and maybe she didn’t take any while she was down there, either. So it gave her blackwater.”

  “Of course,” said Emily.

  “Let me point out right now,” said Miss Finney, “that there’s a major fallacy in what you’re saying, both of you.”

  “What is it?”

  “I won’t answer that question. If you’d done everything I suggested, Hoop, you’d be seeing a little clearer.”

  “But what didn’t I do?”

  “I won’t answer that question either.”

  “What didn’t I do?” Emily asked.

  “For one thing, you haven’t followed my medical career very closely,” Miss Finney said, “but that’s all right, I haven’t followed your articles in the Missionary Survey very closely either.”

  I said, “But if Madame de St. Nicaise didn’t do anything to Liliane, are we all through? That ‘yes and no’ stuff. Do you give Dr. Gollmer his statement, and we’re all wound up and finished?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Morelli?” I asked. “Gollmer?”

  Miss Finney’s answer to that was a shrug. Then, “If you’re listing possibilities, you might list the possibility that I’m also including, and including very seriously. Liliane Morelli might have died a natural death.”

  I had a feeling I didn’t want to recognize, even for myself, but I sat there and felt it for a minute, then there was no possibility of refusing to recognize it, and I admitted it. I said, “Maybe it makes me a mean-spirited louse, but I’m just plain disappointed. I’d got so accustomed to thinking of Madame de St. Nicaise as a murderess that I don’t want to deprive her of the only interest she had as a person.”

  “You’ve got a very delicate point there,” Miss Finney said.

  “What’s delicate about it? She’s duller than dishwater unless she’s bad.”

  “I mean about whether she’s a murderess or not.”

  “Look,” I said, “will you make up your mind?”

  “Here’s the point, Hoop,” Miss Finney said. “She wanted Liliane dead; she tried to kill Liliane; she thinks at this minute that she succeeded in killing Liliane. If that doesn’t make her a murderess I don’t know what does. But I’m not sure she killed Liliane, no matter what she thinks. Suppose Emily wants to kill somebody. Make it, uh, Madame de St. Nicaise because she’s snatched back the pump-organ. Emily goes and takes a shot at the old girl. But for reasons too complicated to figure out for this analogy, let’s say the old girl wasn’t even hit by Emily’s bullet, died of something else. Legally I guess Emily isn’t a murderess. But morally she is and morally is what really counts, the law being only an effort to standardize in applicable form a group moral code. Where are we?”

  “Up where the air’s too thin. All I want is for you to answer yes or no or shut up to a few review questions. One: at this moment you don’t think Madame de St. Nicaise killed Liliane?”

  “Maybe so, maybe not.”

  “But she herself thinks she did?”

  “Yes. Maybe she knows it for certain.”

  “And you’re unwilling to elaborate.”

  “Unwilling.”

  “Ultimately, what are we aiming for?”

  “Ultimately, a confession from Liliane’s murderer, if any. And that, my dear Hoop, is my last word for now.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “In that case, we’re forgetting about lunch. Let’s eat.”

  “We’ve got forty minutes for it,” Miss Finney said. “Dr. Gollmer at two o’clock.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  MISS FINNEY AND EMILY and I had lunch together at the ABC after we left Madame de St. Nicaise, a hurried lunch, no dessert, and at eight minutes to two Miss Finney pushed her plate away and said, “Hoopie, we’ve got to shove off. Emily, there’s work you can do.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Emily. “I’m scared.”

  “Nonsense,” said Miss Finney. “You’ll do just fine. You did just fine on Hoopie—”

  I said, “Huh?”

  “—and you’ll continue to do just fine elsewhere. You remember your itinerary.”

  “But Mary, if anything happens—”

  “Emmy, I tell you again, don’t worry so ! If anything goes wrong I’ll get you out of town fast. Are you tired? Do you want to lie down a while first?”

  “No, if I’ve got to do it, I might as well begin now.” She went through the equivalent of girding up her loins, which meant plucking nervously at the hem of her skirt, rose, said “Well—good-by, then. Good-by, Hoopie dear,” sighed, looked uncertainly down the street, said “Well—” and tottered off.

  I said to Miss Finney, “Of course it’s none of my business what it was that Emily did just fine on Hoopie.”

  “Of course not,” Miss Finney said. “Hurry, we’ll be late for Gollmer.”

  She scribbled her name and room number on the check, said “Nonsense” when I protested, and we started to the car.

  I said, “Also I suppose it isn’t any of my business what kind of villainy you’ve set poor Emily about this afternoon.”

  “None of your business at the moment, but something you practically suggested to me yourself.”

  “When, for—”

  �
��Yesterday. Don’t bother me, Hoopie.”

  As we drove out toward my place I said, “How are you going about this talk with Gollmer?”

  She said, “I don’t quite know. I’m just deciding, or trying to. If you’d be quiet and let me figure it out. I’ll get started somehow and manage it whatever way seems best. Now just let me think about it a little.”

  “Well, all right. But I sure am beginning to feel pushed around.”

  She reached over and patted my knee, which made twice in two days, a record.

  “You’re getting soft in your old age,” I told her.

  “That’s what you think. You’d be surprised.”

  “I’m in a perpetual state of amazement,” I said. “All right, go ahead and think. I’ll shut up.”

  “You know Mr. Tolliver, Dr. Gollmer.”

  “Yes, we have met several times. It is very agreeable to see you again, Monsieur.”

  “Pleasure, Doctor.”

  “Hoopie’ll be here for our little talk. You don’t mind? You can tell him anything you’d tell me.”

  Dr. Gollmer hesitated, making this adjustment, then said, “Of course. Whatever you say, Dr. Finney.”

  “Without beating around the bush, Doctor,” Miss Finney said, “I might as well tell you I’m going to ask you some questions out of just plain female curiosity. I’m just plain curiouser’n hell about a couple of things and I can’t stand it any longer.”

  Dr. Gollmer gave a big smile and said, “Extreme curiosity is a form of pain. The function of our profession being in part the relief of pain, I will be glad to do for you what I can.” When he smiled, his harried old face took on some of the vigor it had had when I first used to see him around town.

  I said, “Shall I have some drinks brought in? What would you like, Dr. Gollmer?”

  He hesitated again, and if he didn’t lick his lips, he gave that impression. Miss Finney said, “Oh, go ahead, Doctor. Let’s relax. I might even have a little one myself. Let’s have some whisky, Hoop. O.K.?”