The Congo Venus

by Matthew Head

  “Thanks,” I said. We all moved toward the door, but just as we got there, Miss Finney said, “Oh, by the way, have you heard any rumors about Morelli and this new girl?”

  “New girl!” he exclaimed. “No, none. What rumors?”

  “Some girl in Thysville,” Miss Finney said. “Well, you’ll hear it soon. Things like that don’t stagnate once they get started, and we’ve already heard it.”

  “You mean a serious affair?”

  Miss Finney said, “Very serious—according to rumor. Marriage.”

  Dr. Gollmer stood with his hand on the door, and said, “I know Morelli well enough to disbelieve it. Something that is supposed to have gone on while Liliane was away?”

  “Something that’s been going on for quite a while, yes,” Miss Finney said. “You haven’t heard anything at all?”

  “Nothing. Of course I hear a little less of that kind of thing than most people do. But I find it difficult to believe of Morelli.”

  “You do? Do you think other people will feel the same way?”

  “My dear lady,” Dr. Gollmer said, “we have already said that a discreditable rumor already has a healthy start in life by the simple advantage of its discreditableness. Of course people will believe it. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know Morelli.”

  “I know Morelli,” Dr. Gollmer said, “and two minutes ago I said I didn’t believe it. But even while I stand here, I find that I am changing my opinion of him to allow me to consider the possibility. You see?” He added, “I am also thinking of Madame de St. Nicaise. Since you apparently saw her this morning in fairly normal circumstances, I take it that she has not yet heard.”

  “It was obvious that she hadn’t,” Miss Finney said. “Quite the reverse.”

  Dr. Gollmer said, “I would not want to be Morelli, when she does hear.”

  “No,” Miss Finney said, “and I wouldn’t want to be Madame de St. Nicaise either.”

  Dr. Gollmer gave something like a laugh and said, “It is quite true that I have really told you nothing at all this afternoon.”

  “Maybe not, but you’ve established a lot that I suspected.”

  “Then I must go. Will I see you again before you leave?”

  “Make it a point to,” Miss Finney said. “I’ll be around perhaps a couple of weeks.”

  “A couple of weeks.” He said very suddenly, “I might leave before that time myself.”

  “You? When did this happen?”

  “Just now,” said Dr. Gollmer. “Or perhaps when I handed you back that letter.”

  “Well for goodness’ sake,” Miss Finney said. “You’ll have to tell me more about it, when you know more yourself. Hoopie, do you think you could get your boy to take Dr. Gollmer home?”

  I went over to the office and found that the car and the driver were there, so I had the car brought around to the yard, and Miss Finney and I waved Dr. Gollmer off. The car bumped out into the street in low, growled and complained through an interval in second, and finally went off with its normal sounds of internal bickering in high, with David, our driver, weaving from curb to curb as was his custom. I said to Miss Finney, “What next?”

  “Thysville,” she said. “You ready?”

  Part Three

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THYSVILLE IS AN extraordinarily pretty little town, built on such precipitous hills that the first-floor windows of one house are likely to look down on the roof of the house next door. There are some spectacular views—not of extreme distances, but sort of mountain landscapes concentrated and reduced—and it is usually fresh and cool there in the evenings. The houses are simple, with lots of comfortable living-porches, and there are pretty good accommodations for transients, since people from Léopoldville and Matadi frequently come there for short rests. All over the place there are tremendous great clumps of bamboo, shooting fresh and green and frothy up into the air.

  It’s an easy ride from Léopoldville by car, if the road isn’t so wet that you bog down in the mud, or so dry that you bog down in the sand. It was reported good, and Miss Finney and Miss Collins and I drove it without any trouble, getting there in time for supper on the cool open terrace of the hotel.

  I was tired, because I had had a little less than four hours’ sleep the night before, and it had been an eventful day, what with Madame de St. Nicaise in the morning, Dr. Gollmer in the afternoon, and the drive to Thysville after that. Tommy Slattery let us have the Dodge on the condition that we foot his taxi bill while we were gone, and we left David, the driver, behind because he understood enough English to be a nuisance and we wanted to be free to talk on the way. So I drove.

  But as a matter of fact Miss Finney didn’t talk much. She was worried about something that had happened during the interview with Gollmer, she said, and in addition she didn’t know exactly what she hoped to accomplish in Thysville, except that she knew there was bound to be something there which would tell us one thing or another, if we could get hold of it.

  “How do we get hold of it?” I asked.

  “How have we got hold of things so far?” she asked. “We talk to people about other people. You know Morelli well enough to be pleasantly surprised if we bump into him, don’t you?”

  “Well enough, for instance, so that if we happened to meet on the street in Thysville I might suggest a drink or something.”

  “That’s well enough for a beginning,” Miss Finney said. “And I know Dr. Chaubel at the so-called rest home. We’ll just have to take what comes.”

  If she had any plans beyond that, she wouldn’t admit it, and as for what she hoped, all she would admit was that if you kept poking around enough with people who had past, present, or possible future connections with a case, and if you remembered every little thing, and kept it all tucked away inside your head until the pieces began to fall together properly, you were pretty sure to get somewhere.

  One thing that made me sore was that she had told me she had to have half an hour with Emily before we started off, so I had to sit out in the car and wait while they went up to their room at the ABC to gather together a few things and to give Emily a chance to report on the leg work, whatever it was, that she had been assigned that afternoon while we were talking to Dr. Gollmer. When I asked Miss Finney about this—I said, “Well, how do you feel about Emmy’s job?”—she said, “Emmy did a fine job. She’s turning into a real technician.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Hoopie, you’re bothersome as a fly. Why don’t you be quiet?”

  “We might as well have brought David along to do the driving,” I said. “I have a perfect command of English and I haven’t learned a goddam thing.”

  “What would you like to know, for instance?” Miss Finney asked.

  “You know what I want to know. I want to know what you put Emmy up to.”

  Miss Finney thought about this a moment, then she said, “All right, I’ll tell you. Emmy’s been out counteracting the rumor that Morelli’s got a girl in Thysville.”

  “That’s he’s got one, or that he plans to marry her?”

  “Both.”

  “And what do you mean by ‘counteract’?”

  “I mean deny.”

  “You’re out of your head,” I told her. “You know perfectly well, and you’ve said it again and again, that denying a rumor’s just an effective way of spreading it.”

  “I certainly do,” Miss Finney said.

  “That’s exactly the way Madame de St. Nicaise spread rumors about Liliane.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “Well, then.”

  “The point is that Madame de St. Nicaise has been a dirty fighter all along the line,” Miss Finney said. “So I got to thinking, maybe the way to get at this woman is the fire-with-fire idea, or dose-of-her-own-medicine, and so on. I figured that like most dirty fighters she’s likely to be more vulnerable to her own methods of attack than to any others. You know how it is—stupid people who want to harm others try to hit wh
ere it would hurt them most themselves.”

  Emmy sighed. “She seemed so nice, at first,” she said.

  “So I propositioned Emmy,” Miss Finney went on, “and gave her a general idea of what the situation was, including a general idea of what her buddy Madame de St. Nicaise was really like, pump-organ or no pump-organ. Madame de St. Nicaise hadn’t heard about Morelli’s girl this morning, and I just wanted her to hear as soon as possible. Drop a bee like that in a bonnet like Madame de St. Nicaise’s and you’re likely to get something. So I sent Emmy out on this little expediting tour.”

  “I had the most rewarding afternoon,” Emily said happily. Then she looked at Miss Finney, and Miss Finney nodded and said, “Tell him about it,” so Emily said, “Well, I told you about how I was sitting at the piano bench at the meeting of the Ladies’ group, because I had been playing ‘Onward Chris—’”

  “Never mind how you got on the piano bench,” Miss Finney said. “We remember that from this morning.”

  “Well, then,” Emily said, “I told you I heard some of these ladies whispering and all. Remember? Well, today I went around to all the places where those ladies might be, and the other ladies that maybe hadn’t heard yet. I went to each of the ice-cream shops, and I hope I never see another dish of ice cream in my life—raspberry, vanilla, and banana—and I even went to the Equatoriale and had a lemon squash”—she gave a slight hiccup at the memory—“and I dropped into dress shops and things, and altogether I had a very busy afternoon. And so one place and another I would see these ladies that belonged to the group, and sometimes they would have friends along, and I would say that I thought it was mean and scandalous that such things should be said about Mr. Morelli, and that I had it on the best authority, which I was not at liberty to divulge, that there was nothing to the rumor at all—nothing.” She concluded primly: “I think I managed to do quite a bit of good.”

  Miss Finney regarded Emily with pride and said, “You know, I’ve worked with Emily for nearly thirty years, and I’ve never before thought or breathed a suspicion that she was more dangerous than skimmed milk and distilled water.”

  “Well I like that!” Emily squeaked in outrage. “Skimmed milk!”

  “When that rumor gets to Madame de St. Nicaise you can call yourself Little Dynamite,” I said. “Now there’s another question.”

  “Not now there isn’t,” Miss Finney said. She sighed heavily, and I saw that she was really tired and worried. “I don’t mean to sound cross, Hoopie,” she said, “but I’ve got to do a little worrying. I’m not a very good worrier, don’t have a real talent for it, and I need quiet.”

  “I’ll be quiet, but tell me what you’re going to worry about.”

  “Gollmer.”

  “About Gollmer how?”

  “About Gollmer giving that letter back to me. I really mean it, Hoop, I’ve got to think something out, and what I’ve got to think out,” she said, “is whether I ought to drop this case right here, or try to go on with it.”

  That shut Emily and me both up, because we had never either of us heard anything like that before from Mary Finney. The three of us rode along for a long time without speaking. Fifteen minutes later Emily said suddenly, “Skimmed milk! The idea!” but that was the end of that conversation because now I was thinking about things too, and we rode along, with the atmosphere in the car a little depressed.

  But after we got there, it was fine. Thysville was so pretty and so simple, and the evening was so cool, and we had such a good supper of tender white fish and French fries and an honest-to-God green salad and an ice—which Emily couldn’t face—that I felt rested enough to go on with anything Mary Finney suggested. But what she suggested was bed, immediately, for one and all.

  “But Mary, it’s only eight o’clock!” Emily objected.

  “Don’t talk back to me,” Miss Finney said. “You’ve had a taxing day. Go on.”

  “I’m not going to go up to bed and leave you here talking all night,” Emily said. “I’ll go if you’ll make Hoopie go too.”

  “Come on,” I said. I didn’t bother to say good night to Miss Finney, but propelled Emmy away from the table and saw her to her room.

  “Good night, Hoopie,” she said. “I know you’re going right back down there with Mary, so don’t think you’re getting away with anything.”

  I said, “Good night, Emmy,” and went back down and found that Miss Finney had moved from the table over to an easy chair on one corner of the terrace. She sat there with her knees crossed, waggling one foot and watching it. When I came up she looked at me and said in mock surprise, “What, you here? Siddown,” and I pulled up a chair.

  “No bed for me yet,” I said, “not after one taste of blood.”

  Miss Finney looked at me with a look that would have been blank if there hadn’t been a little guarded suspicion showing through it, and said, “What in hell are you talking about, Hoop?”

  “About how this afternoon I dug one answer—of sorts—out of you, about Emily’s leg work, and you’ve got my appetite whetted.”

  “What is it this time?” she said, still looking blankish. “No guarantee, you understand.”

  “I want to know what the major fallacy was that you said Emmy and I were both of us making.”

  “Oh, that,” said Miss Finney. “You know I said if you’d done everything I suggested, you’d be seeing a little clearer.”

  “Go ahead, what didn’t I do?”

  “You didn’t look up blackwater fever. I’m going to take it back about seeing clearer, though. I only wish it were that simple. I asked you what you knew about blackwater and you told me. Then I told you I wouldn’t call you exactly an authority, but you had all the popular notions down, and suggested you look it up. Well, the popular notions, like most popular notions, happen to be all wrong. You don’t get blackwater fever from too much quinine.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said, without conviction.

  “I also told Emily she didn’t follow my medical career very closely,” Miss Finney went on. “The fact is, you’ll find blackwater occurring where there’s no malaria at all. Makes it sort of hard to regard blackwater as the result of malaria plus too much quinine. Fifteen years ago I tabulated every reported case of malaria and blackwater in the records of the Congo, Kenya, and South Africa, and the two diseases just plain aren’t coextensive—that’s the word—here, or anywhere else. I wasn’t the only one working on it, other people were doing it other places, but anyhow I did the job here and I got damn good publication. That old quinine gag just doesn’t hold.”

  I said meekly, “But that doesn’t mean Madame de St. Nicaise didn’t do exactly what Emily and I thought. It doesn’t mean she didn’t hold out on Liliane’s regular quinine hoping for malaria. It doesn’t mean she didn’t lie to Gollmer thinking his dosage would turn it into blackwater.”

  “Of course it doesn’t,” Miss Finney said. “It doesn’t mean that Madame de St. Nicaise didn’t believe exactly the same popular notion both of you believed, and act on it. It doesn’t mean that every time she gave Liliane the prescribed quinine she didn’t give it to her with all the satisfaction she’d have got out of giving her poison. That’s why I say she’s a murderess in intent and in moral fact—and in her own conviction, for that matter. I’m just as convinced as you are that she was capable of an action like that. And I can imagine her absolute joy when Liliane asked for Gollmer. She thought Gollmer murdered her cat, and now with Liliane in her hands and a chance to make Gollmer appear responsible for her death, she really had something, something that made the affair of the ‘Venus’ look insignificant. I was glad to hear all that from Gollmer, though; what Madame de St. Nicaise did there was almost like a rehearsal for this thing. Oh, she must have felt pretty good. But she was under a delusion all the time.”

  “She may have been under a delusion, but Liliane did die.”

  Miss Finney hitched herself uncomfortably and said, “And Liliane shouldn’t have. With the kind of health she h
ad, she should have survived malaria and blackwater too—if it was blackwater. It’s perfectly true that Gollmer’s treatment should have been adequate under normal circumstances. At least,” she added grimly enough, “if those records weren’t falsified.”

  “Would you mind telling me exactly what those records showed?”

  “Perfectly normal course for a serious attack of malaria—serious, but not with any indication that it could be expected to terminate fatally. It showed a perfectly normal progress with every indication, toward the end, that Liliane was getting better, up to the last two days, when—bango! she dies, with the usual symptoms of malaria, which overlap the symptoms of blackwater, plus the specific ones of blackwater itself.”

  “Rigor and black urine,” I said.

  “Yes,” Miss Finney said. “That little bit of popular knowledge happens to be correct. And incidentally you might take note that Madame de St. Nicaise undoubtedly knew that, along with her misconceptions.”

  “Does that mean something?”

  “Something obvious,” she said irritably. “Forget it.”

  She wasn’t like herself at all. She always had had a way of saying things that would have sounded harsh and jibing if you hadn’t seen that she was half smiling at you all the time, or just covering up the natural timidity she always had in showing any kind of affection, but now she really sounded cross, and I had never heard her sound that way before.

  I said, “I don’t see why you’re so discouraged on this case. It seems to me—well, I don’t know. What is the matter?”

  “Look, Hoop,” she said. “Stop to think. Doesn’t anything strike you as odd about Dr. Gollmer and that letter I wrote for him?”

  “It struck me as a fairly large-sized gesture when he handed it back to you, when he wanted it so much.”