The Congo Venus

by Matthew Head

  “Of course that is why we are all here now, because something happened. Just the way it happened before. Jeanne died and he married Liliane when he wanted me. Then all those years with Liliane, we must forgive him a great deal. Everyone knows what she was. I won’t speak ill of the dead. And Hector never touched me, all those years. Then he put the pillow over Liliane’s face because she was getting well, but it happened again. He came home this afternoon. I was waiting. They had told me about it this morning. Another girl. How could it happen again, I wondered, the natives do it, you know, they have ways, nasty ways. I think Gollmer is in with them. His house is full of nasty things, I have seen them, oh, I know!

  “They told me. They said they thought I ought to know. Then they went away. So I thought, I must save Hector. It was a bad time; I sent the boys away, I told them not to come back. It was a very bad time. Toward the end of it I decided what to do, and I spent it making myself—you know, a little younger. You see?”

  (She touched her scorched hair and smiled. “This is the way Jeanne did her hair, Jeanne, my sister,” she said; she put one finger tip delicately to an eyebrow, and smiled. She put one finger before her distorted mouth, like an admonition to silence.)

  “But when he came in, it was terrible. It was too late to save him, as it turned out. Oh, he laughed, he laughed! He said to me, Hélène, Hélène, what have you been doing to yourself? laughing, but he stopped laughing, and began saying things which were dreadful, although he thought they were kind. I was too late to save him. But I told him, I told him it must not happen again with this girl the way it happened with Liliane, and he denied everything, he said there was no girl. I thought for a moment I had saved him but then I found it was too late, I could not save him, because I was happy and I threw my arms around him. That was all right, don’t you think? because it was what he really wanted, and I would have kissed him, I tried, I held him and I was trying to save him, if I could have kissed him I could have saved him, but I couldn’t, and my wrists hurt and I was on the floor crying, crying, lying there crying, and then I remembered the whisky. I have ways, you know, I had fixed the whisky with the poison in it we had for the rats, it was strychnine, and I went and got it for him. He was telephoning, you know, calling Dr. Chaubel, as if I didn’t know what that meant, so I got the whisky, and gave him some. No, no!” (she cried out, and wrung her hands distractedly, looking about her in confusion), “No, it was not that way, I am telling it wrong. I had it all straight but now I am forgetting it. Let me think. Let me stop to think! I must not let them know I gave him the whisky while we were waiting! I didn’t let them know it, did I? No, he did it, I said to him, Why do you want to be alive, to live again as you lived with Liliane? I said, Cuckold! Cuckold! I said, Cuckold and murderer, you killed Liliane with the pillow, I saw! and he said, I cannot stand it! and that was when he went out to the kitchen where he had the poison hidden, and took it. How could I know what was happening? What could I do? Nothing is my fault! I did little things I must not tell about, but Hector is already dead, everything is paid for now, and now you must let me go, let me go, let me GO! GO! GO!”

  The woman, Dr. Chaubel’s assistant, was very skillful. She produced the hypodermic and administered it to Madame de St. Nicaise almost before I knew what was happening. Madame de St. Nicaise began to grow quiet immediately, and she paid no attention when Miss Finney came in, followed by Dr. Chaubel. Dr. Chaubel said to me, “Morelli is safe now. He will be able to tell us everything, in the morning.”

  Madame de St. Nicaise turned her gaze on him half comprehendingly. Miss Finney said, “I don’t think he’ll be able to tell us much we don’t know. Madame de St. Nicaise has given us a voluntary confession—in a way.” In a moment she added, “Doctor, do you mind if Madame de St. Nicaise sees Morelli?”

  “If she wants to. He’s asleep, of course.”

  “It’s that I want her to.”

  Dr. Chaubel said to the woman, “Will you bring Madame?” Miss Finney nodded to me, and we all went down the hall in the direction of the room where I had seen the bright light and the white wall. I looked accusingly at Miss Finney and she muttered, “Sorry. I had to fool you, Hoop. I knew she wouldn’t say it unless she thought Morelli was dead, and you’re such a poor dissembler.”

  We came to the door and went in. The room was dimmed now. Morelli lay there with his eyes closed in a face that was deathly haggard, but you could see his regular breathing.

  Madame de St. Nicaise approached the bed and looked at him quietly. Dr. Chaubel and the woman were tense at each side of her, but she made no motion toward Morelli. In the dim light of the room her grotesque face was partially obscured, and as she stood there it was possible to feel sorry for her almost without horror of her. She stood so for a long time.

  “How quietly he breathes,” she said at last. Then, “Like Liliane. If I had a pillow again, now—a pillow...”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MORELLI CORROBORATED the statement of Madame de St. Nicaise as it was translatable through her distortions and confusions. It was true that he had expected to be out of the house all that day. He had not been to the Appro offices during all the time of Liliane’s critical illness, but once there, in spite of Liliane’s great improvement, he had been uneasy enough—and exhausted enough—to return home early in the afternoon. When he opened the door of his house, it was unnaturally quiet; there were no boys anywhere, which was unheard of, and he had shouted out, and received no answer. He had run up the stairs and flung open the door to Liliane’s room, making no effort at quiet. He saw Madame de St. Nicaise’s back, bent over the bed, arms rigid, pressing downward. He said that she had no idea how long she had been that way; she was quite rigid, and as if numb, when he pulled her away. Liliane was dead, and from the flattened hair and the distortion of the face, the pillow must have been pressed there for a very long time before he arrived. It was probable that Liliane was in a stupor from the pills before Madame de St. Nicaise smothered her with the pillow.

  Gollmer of course never knew anything of all this, and he shows up so badly, in any case, that I think it is important to bear in mind that he never had any suspicion that Liliane died as the result of anything other than his own carelessness and inefficiency—which were terrible enough but, in truth, would not have caused her death. He had been, as Madame de St. Nicaise had said, quite drunk by the time Morelli had located him and managed to convince him that he must come to the house. It had even been necessary to sober him up. All in all, Liliane’s death was not reported until something like eight or even ten hours after it had occurred. When all this came out, Gollmer’s license was revoked, but since he had reported the death as soon as he was mentally and physically able to do so, and since he had reported the cause of death as what, in good faith, he believed it to be, he was not guilty of a criminal offense.

  For Morelli it was more serious. He pleaded that the shock of Liliane’s death and the realization of Madame de St. Nicaise’s condition, combined with his state of extreme fatigue, rendered him emotionally incapable of dealing clear-sightedly with the situation, and he had fallen into the deception. He pointed out that as soon as he felt able he had gone to Dr. Chaubel as the first step in rectifying his mistakes, but Morelli’s respect for conventional appearances was strong, and it is anybody’s guess as to whether or not he would have revealed the exact circumstances of Liliane’s death since it had become apparent, until Miss Finney’s intrusion into things, that he would not have to do so. He was given a suspended sentence and I believe is in Belgium.

  Madame de St. Nicaise is in Belgium too. She gives no trouble to the asylum attendants and spends many hours caring for her cello, upon which she refuses, they say, to put any strings at all.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ONE AFTERNOON, NOT quite two weeks after the events in the hospital, I was having coffee with Schmitty at the Equatoriale because it wasn’t quite time yet for me to go and have lemonades, by appointment, with Miss Finney and Miss Coll
ins at the ABC.

  I said to Schmitty, “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to confess as yet to having had an extremely unaccustomed attack of tender heart recently?”

  “Certainly not,” said Schmitty.

  “I didn’t think you would,” I said, “but I wish you’d trust me, old man. I’ve had the same thing happen to me, lots of times.”

  Schmitty looked at me suspiciously and said, “Come clean.”

  “What I mean is,” I said, “you wouldn’t have been above going to a certain prominent female lady missionary doctor and suggesting that she make a belated effort to pull a fellow M.D. out of a hole, would you? Belated and, as it proved, somewhat misguided.”

  For lack of anything better to say, Schmitty used on me his favorite unprintable epithet that he saved for very special occasions.

  “Who, me?” I said. “Same goes back on you again double. You did, didn’t you?”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “I know Madame de St. Nicaise used to get in your hair.” I looked at his scalp and added, “So to speak.”

  “You leave my hair out of this!” Schmitty barked, off guard. He pulled himself together and said, “Anyway, she used to get in everybody’s hair. She sure got in yours.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “However, you were person number one in Léopoldville to pay cash down direct to the old boy himself for an original Gollmer, and I think it was a soft heart.”

  Schmitty shrugged unconvincingly. “What if I did?” he said. “What if I did go to Dr. Finney with a damn fool suggestion? Nothing happened.”

  I thought that someday I must tell Schmitty about everything that had happened as a result, but for the time being it would be better if nobody at all knew about it. Schmitty was muttering, “Get old von Schmidt mixed up in anything, it’s jinxed from the start. What if I did?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I considered saying something else, such as that I, for one, would give him my unqualified personal O.K. any time, but if I had said it he would have been embarrassed every time he saw me from then on, so I let it ride.

  Instead I said, “Absolutely nothing at all. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a rendezvous.”

  “I hope you get plowed under,” said Schmitty ambiguously, and I left him.

  Fifteen minutes later, over lemonades with Miss Finney and Miss Collins on the little section of balcony, overlooking the river, that went off their room at the ABC, we were talking along about nothing much, when I said to Miss Finney, “You were awfully lucky on this case, when you come right down to it. If Morelli hadn’t turned up with that girl in Thysville you’d never have cracked it.”

  “You really think that?”

  “Well, maybe you would have found another way, but as it was, this was pretty fortunate. Do you think he really had a girl over there?”

  Miss Finney said, “Emily, what do you think?”

  Emily looked from Miss Finney to me and back again and made small sounds of alarm.

  Miss Finney laughed. “There never was a girl in Thysville,” she said. “Emmy and I knew it all the time. It was just a rumor.”

  “And what makes you so sure of that? Just because Morelli looked sort of run down—”

  “But Hoopie dear,” Miss Finney said, “there never was a rumor, even, until Emmy went out to deny it. I told you once, when you asked me what kind of villainy I’d set Emmy about, that it was something you almost suggested yourself. And you did, when you said something about dropping rumors around town and seeing which ones came out ahead. So I thought shucks, with rumors as easy to drop as they are, why not set them about a little good work for a change? So I figured I’d drop this one about Morelli, and if Madame de St. Nicaise wasn’t guilty of doing what we thought she had done, for the reason we thought she had done it, she might be uncomfortable—might itch a little bit or something—but if she was guilty, I knew it’d drive her wild. What’s the matter?”

  “Just shuddering, that’s all. I don’t suppose you thought about Morelli when you had this big idea? I don’t mean to strike too high a moral tone in loose company, but I’d like to know if you even gave him a thought.”

  “Morelli’s reputation, you mean. I thought of it. At the risk of sounding a little cynical, I’d like to point out what you very well know, to wit, that socio-sexual attitudes being what they are, a man’s extracurricular affairs are apt to redound to his credit, no matter what the nominal moral attitude may be. As a corollary, the adulterer’s activities redound to the discredit of his wife only; the adulteress’s affairs redound to her own discredit as well as her husband’s. That’s called the double standard—maybe you’ve heard of it. Either way, it’s tough on the girls.”

  “I suppose you picked up this quaint old attitude in Fort Scott, Kansas?”

  “All right then, it’s more a European attitude than an American one, but we’re among Europeans. To suggest that a man in his fifties who already has a beautiful wife also has the attraction and the physical stamina to keep a second ménage going near by may be a scandalous suggestion on the face of it but at bottom what you’re really doing is feeling his biceps and saying what-a-man. No, I didn’t worry about Morelli. In passing, Hoops, I’d like to point out to you that if you had checked up on time sequences you’d have known it was an invention. Emmy mentioned it at breakfast that morning and I didn’t have time to get to her and arrange for her to go around denying the rumor before she began on the job.”

  “The Ladies were already talking about it. Emmy said so.”

  “Oh, dear,” Emmy said, appalled at herself in retrospect.

  “Now, Emily,” said Miss Finney, “keep your conscience under control. It all worked out, didn’t it, just the way I said it would?”

  “That’s pragmatism,” I said, “and I’ve been taught that pragmatism’s naughty. The devil’s methods in the Lord’s work. But let that pass. I still say the Ladies had already been talking about it.”

  “But Hoopie—don’t you remember how Emily was afraid to go out on the job, and I told her she had done just fine on Hoopie that morning, and you wanted to know what she had done just fine on you with, or something like that? That was the story about the Ladies. Of course they hadn’t been talking about it. Emily and I had only invented it in bed the night before we had breakfast with you. I told Emily what I suspected of Madame de St. Nicaise and how I thought we could get at her with her own methods, and Emmy agreed, but she didn’t think she was up to the job—said she hadn’t any talent for acting or deception, and I said she might try it out first where it would be safe if it failed—on you, Hoopie dear. So after breakfast that morning she gave you this long line of chatter about sitting on the piano bench playing ‘Onward—’”

  Emily interjected, “I did sit on the piano bench and I did play ‘Onw—’”

  “But she didn’t hear any gossip,” Miss Finney said. “She just made up that story.”

  “You can act, all right,” I said to Emily. She gave me a pleading glance. I said, “I’ll return your hook, line, and sinker if they ever turn up. In other words, there never was so much as a whisper of anything about Morelli and a girl in Thysville until Emmy went out and got bloated on banana ice cream and lemon squash and denied it right and left to the Ladies who were most likely to get it back to Madame de St. Nicaise quickest.”

  “Correct,” said Miss Finney.

  “I can only say,” I told them, “that for the first time I am reconciled to staying here while you two take off for the Kivu. In fact I like the idea. Nobody’s safe while you’re around.”

  “Oh, Hoopie!” Emily quavered, and I had to assure her that I didn’t mean a word of it.

  We talked around a bit and I was just getting ready to leave when a boy came up and said there was a gentleman in the lobby to see Miss Finney. Mr. Gollmer.

  “Send him up,” Miss Finney said. Everyone had heard that Gollmer was leaving town, even before his license was revoked. All they knew was that he was goin
g across the river to Brazzaville, then by rail to Pointe Noire, and then by boat to Marseille. Everyone had tried hard to learn something more, but that was as far as they could get.

  “Coming to say good-by, I suppose,” Miss Finney said. It was past five o’clock already, and the last launch to Brazzaville crossed at six, from the station only a block or so away from the hotel.

  Emily said in her wispy little voice, “Mary, should I leave?”

  “Stick around,” Miss Finney said, making Emily feel like one of the boys. “Hoop, go in and get another chair and bring it out here.”

  But when Gollmer came, he remained standing, because he said he had only a minute. Mademoiselle Lala and Mademoiselle Baba were downstairs waiting for him in the lobby, watching the luggage.

  “Have them come up,” Miss Finney said.

  “Oh, no,” Gollmer said, smiling, “they will be happier down there. They are always happier together than with other people.”

  “O.K.,” said Miss Finney. “Well, we’ll miss you, Gollmer.”

  Gollmer shook his head, still smiling a little bit. “No, I think not,” he said. “Perhaps you, Dr. Finney, for you like people, but most of them—no, old Gollmer will not be missed, except as something to talk about. They have so little. And he leaves in disgrace.”