3
“MUTINA—IN JAIL?” THE YOUNG man faltered unbelievingly.
“Sure, good an’ tight, an’ where else should she be?” returned the detective with a nod to de Grandin and me. “’Tis sorry I am ter come sneakin’ in on yez like this, gentlemen,” he apologized, “but th’ office sent me up to Algonquin Avenue hotfoot when yer message wuz received, an’ after I’d made me arrest I thought I’d best be comin’ here ter talk matters over wid yez. Th’ bell didn’t seem to ring when I pushed th’ button, an’ it’s a cruel cold night outside, so I let meself in, seein’ as how yer light waz goin, an’ I knew ye’d be up an’ ready ter talk.”
“Assuredly,” de Grandin assented with a nod. “But how comes it that you put Mademoiselle—Madame Mutina under arrest, my friend?”
“Why”—the big Irishman looked wonderingly at the little Frenchman—“what else wuz there ter do, Dr. de Grandin, sor? ’Twas yerself as saw what a howly slaughter-house they’d made o’ her place, an’ dead men—an’ women—don’t die widout help. So, when the young woman comes rushin’ up ter th’ place in a taxi all out o’ breath, as ye might say, hot as fire ter be after gittin inside ter meet someone, why, sez I to meself, ‘Ah-ho, me gur-rl, ’tis yerself, an’ no one else, as knows sumpin more about these shenanigans than meets th’ naked eye, else ye wouldn’t be so anxious ter meet someone—wid never a livin’ soul save th’ pore dead creatures inside th’ house ter meet at all, at all.’
“She started some cock-and-bull story about havin’ a date wid a gent whose name she didn’t know at the house—some foreign man, he were, she said. I’ll be bettin’ me Sunday boots he wuz a foreigner, too—’twas no Christian American who did those bloody murders, an’ ye can be sure o’ that, too, savin’ yer presence, Dr. de Grandin, sor.”
The little Frenchman stroked his tiny wheaten mustache caressingly. “I agree with you, mon cher,” he assented, “but the young lady’s story was not entirely of the gentleman chicken and cow, for it was I whom she was to meet at her house. It was for the purpose of meeting her that Friend Trowbridge and I went there, and found what we discovered. Sergeant Costello, am I a fool?”
“Howly Mither, no!” denied the Irishman. “‘If they wuz more fools like you in th’ wor-rld, Dr. de Grandin, sor, we’d be after havin’ fewer funny houses ter keep th’ nitwits in, I’m thinkin’.”
“Precisely.” de Grandin assented. “But I tell you, mon brave, Madame Mutina not only did not commit those killings; she suspected nothing of them. Consider: Is it likely she would have made an assignation with Friend Trowbridge and me had she thought we would find evidences of murder there?”
Costello shook his head.
“Très bon. Again: It was twenty-one minutes past eleven when Friend Trowbridge and I left her at La Pontoufle Dorée; it was not later than half-past when we arrived at her house, and the poor ones had not been long dead when we got there—their flesh was warm and there was still heat in the murdered woman’s cigar; but they had been dead from ten to fifteen minutes, though not much longer. Nevertheless, if we were with Madame Mutina nine minutes before, she could not have been present at the killing.”
“But she might ’a’ known sumpin about it,” the Irishman persisted.
“I doubt it much. At the night club both Friend Trowbridge and I saw several most unbeautiful men who frightened her greatly. It was at sight of them she entrusted some object to me and begged I go to her home with all speed, there to await her coming. As we drove through the storm on our errand another car passed us with great swiftness. Whether the four unlovely ones rode in it or not, I can not say, but I believe they did. In any event, as we left the house after viewing the murdered bodies, a man closely resembling one of them attacked me from behind, and had it not been for good, brave Friend Trowbridge and this so excellent young man here, Jules de Grandin would now he happy in heaven—I hope.
“As it is”—he seized the pointed tips of his mustache in a sudden fierce grip and twisted them till I thought he would tear the hairs loose—“as it is, I still live, and there is earthly work to do. Come, let us go, let us hasten, let us repair immediately to the jail where I may interview the unfortunate, beautiful Madame Mutina.
“No, my friend,” he denied as Starkweather would have risen to accompany us, “it is better that you remain away for a time. Me, I shall undertake that no harm comes to your lady, but for the purposes I have in mind I think it best she sees you not for a time. Be assured, I shall give you leave to greet her at the earliest possible moment.”
HIS CHIN THRUST MOODILY into the upturned collar of his greatcoat, the little Frenchman sat beside me in silence as I drove him and Costello toward police headquarters. As we rounded a corner, driving cautiously to avoid skidding over the sleety pavement, he seemed suddenly to arrive at a decision. “Through Tunlaw Street, if you please, good friend,” he ordered. “I would stop at the excellent Bacigalupo’s for a little minute.”
“At Bacigalupo’s?” I echoed in amazement. “Why, Mike has been in bed for hours!”
“Then he must arise,” was the uncompromising reply. “I would do the business with him.”
No light burned in the windows of the tiny flat where Mike Bacigalupo lived above his prosperous fruit stand, but repeated rings at the bell and poundings on the door finally brought a sleepy and none too amiable Italian head from one of the darkened openings, like an irate tortoise peeping from its shell.
“Holà, my friend,” de Grandin hailed, “we are come to buy limes. Have the goodness to put ten or a dozen in a bag for us at once.”
“Limas?” demanded the Italian in a shocked voice. “You wanta da lima at half-pas’ fourteen o’clock? You come to hell—I not come down to sell limas to Benito Mussolini deesa time o’ night. Sapr-r-risti! You mus’ t’inka me craze.”
For answer de Grandin broke into a flood of rapid, voluble Italian. What he said I do not know, but five minutes later the fruit merchant, shivering with cold inside the folds of a red-flannel bathrobe, appeared at the door and handed him a small paper parcel. More, as we turned away he waved his hand and called, “Arrivederci, amico mio.”
I was burning with curiosity as we drove toward headquarters, but long experience with the eccentric little Frenchman had taught me better than to attempt to force his confidence.
It was a frightened and pathetic little figure the police matron ushered into the headquarters room a few minutes later. “M’sieu’,” she exclaimed piteously at sight of de Grandin, running forward and holding out both slender ivory hands to him, “you have come to save me from this place?”
“More than that, ma petit chère; I have come to save you from those who persecute you, if it please heaven,” he replied soberly. “You know not why you are arrested, do you?”
“N-no,” she faltered. “I came from the club as quickly as I could, but this man and others seized me as I alighted from my taxi. They would not let me enter my own house or see my faithful friends. Oh, M’sieu’, make them let me see Hussein and Batjan and Jobita, please.”
“Ma pauvre,” de Grandin replied, resting his hands gently on her shoulders, “you can not see them ever again. Those of whom we wot—they arrived first.”
“D-dead?” the girl stammered half comprehendingly.
He nodded silently as he led her to a seat. Then: “We must see that others do not travel the same path,” he added. “You, yourself, may be their next target. You are guilty of no crime, but perhaps it would be safer were you to remain here until—”
As he spoke, never taking his eyes from hers, he rummaged about in his overcoat pocket and suddenly snatched his hand out, crushing one of the limes we had obtained from Bacigalupo between his long, deceptively slender fingers. The pale-gold rind broke beneath his pressure, and a stream of amber juice spurted through the rent, spattering on the girl’s bare arm.
“O-o-o-oh—ai, ai!” she screamed as the acid liquid touched her flesh, then writhed away from him as though the li
me juice had been burning oil.
“A-hee!” she gave the shrill, piercing mourning cry of the East as her eyes fastened on the glistening spots of moisture on her forearm, and their round pupils suddenly drew in and shrank to slits like those of a cat coming suddenly out of a darkened room into the light.
“Bien—très bon!” de Grandin exclaimed, snatching a silk handkerchief from his cuff and drying her arm. “I am sorry, truly sorry, my poor one; believe me, sooner would Jules de Grandin suffer torture than cause you pain, but it was necessary that I do it. See, it is all well, now.”
But it was not all well. Where the gushing lime juice had struck her tender flesh there was a cluster of ugly, red weals on the girl’s arm as though her white, soft skin were scalded.
4
FOR A MOMENT THEY faced each other in silence, the alert, blond Frenchman and the magnolia-white Eastern girl, and mutual understanding shone in their eyes.
“How—how did you know?” she faltered.
“I did not know, my little one,” de Grandin confessed in a low voice, “but what I learned tonight caused me to suspect. Hélas, I was only too right in my surmise!”
He gazed thoughtfully at the prison floor, his narrow chin tightly gripped between his thumb and forefinger, then:
“Are you greatly attached to the Prophet, my child?” he asked. “Would you consent to Christian baptism?”
She looked at him in bewilderment as she replied: “Of course; is not the man of my heart of the Nazarenes? If it so be they go endlessly to be companions of hell-fire, as the Prophet (on whom be peace!) declares in the book of Imran’s family, then let Mutina’s face be blackened too at the last great day, and let her go to everlasting torment with the man she loves. I ask nothing better in the hereafter than to share his torture, if torture be his portion; but in this life it is written that I must keep far away, else I bring on him the vengeance of—”
“Enough!” de Grandin interrupted almost sternly. “Sergeant, we must release Madame Mutina instantly. Come, I am impatient to take her hence. Trowbridge, my friend, do you engage a clergyman at once and have him at the house without delay. It is of importance that we act with speed.”
Mutina had been booked for detention only as a material witness, and it was not difficult for Costello to procure her release. In five minutes they had left for my house in a taxicab while I drove toward Saint Luke’s rectory, intent on dragging the Reverend Leon Barley from his bed.
With the clergyman in tow I entered the study an hour later, finding de Grandin, Mutina and Costello talking earnestly, but Starkweather nowhere in sight. “Why, where is—” I began, but the Frenchman’s uplifted finger cut my question off half uttered.
“It is better that we name no names at present, Friend Trowbridge,” he warned, then to Dr. Barley:
“This young lady has the desire for baptism, mon père; you will officiate forthwith? Dr. Trowbridge and I will stand sponsors.”
“Why, it’s a little unusual,” the pastor began, but de Grandin interrupted with a vigorous nod of his head. “Parbleu, it is more unusual than you can suppose,” he agreed. “It is with the unusual we have to deal tonight my friend, and the ungodly, as well. Come, do us your office and do it quickly, for be assured we have not dragged you from the comfort of your bed for nothing this night.”
The Reverend Leon Barley, pious man of God and knowing man of the world, was not the sort of carping stickler for the purity of ecclesiastical rules who casts discredit on the clergy. Though uninformed concerning the ceremony, he realized haste was necessary, and adjusted his stole with the deft quickness learned from service with the A.E.F., and before that in the Philippine insurrection.
Swiftly the beautiful, dignified service proceeded:
“Wilt thou then obediently keep God’s holy will and commandments and walk in the same all the days of thy life?” asked Dr. Barley.
“I will, by God’s help,” murmured Mutina softly.
“Mutina”—Dr. Barley’s hand dipped into the Minton salad bowl of water standing on the table and sprinkled a few drops on the girl’s bowed head—“I baptize thee in the name of the—”
The solemn pronouncement was drowned in a terrible, blood-chilling scream, for as the sacramental water touched her head Mutina fell forward to the floor and lay there writhing as though in mortal agony.
“Gawd A’mighty!” cried Costello hoarsely. “’Tis th’ divil’s wor-rk, fer sure!”
“Sang de Dieu!” cried Jules de Grandin, bending above the prostrate girl. “Look, Friend Trowbridge, for the love of good God, look!”
Face downward, clawing at the rugs and seemingly convulsed in unsupportable torture, lay Mutina, and the gleaming black hair sleekly parted on her small head was turning snowy white before our eyes!
“Great heavens, what is it?” asked the minister unsteadily.
The girl’s hysterical movements ceased as de Grandin held a glass of aromatic ammonia and water to her lips, and she whimpered softly as her head rolled weakly in the crook of his elbow.
For a moment he regarded her solicitously; then, as he helped her to a chair, he turned to the clergyman. “It would seem the devil makes much ado about being cheated of a victim,” he remarked almost casually. “This poor one was the inheritor of a curse with which she had no more to do than the unborn child with the color of his father’s hair. Eh bien, I have that upstairs which will do more to revive her body and spirit than all the eau bénite in all the world’s fonts.”
Tiptoeing to the stairs he called: “Richard—Richard, my friend, come down forthwith and see what we have brought!”
There was a pounding of feet on the steps, a glad, wondering cry from the study door, and Richard Starkweather and Mutina, his wife, were locked in each other’s arms.
“Come away quickly, my friends,” de Grandin ordered in a sharp whisper as he motioned us from the room. “It is a profanation for our eyes to look on their reunion. Anon we must interrupt them, for there is much to be said and much more to be done, but this moment is theirs, and theirs alone.”
5
FIVE OF US GATHERED in my drawing-room after dinner the following evening. Sergeant Costello, mellowed with the effects of an excellent meal, several glasses of fifteen-year-old liqueur Chartreuse and the fragrant fumes of an Hoyo de Monterey, lolled in the wing chair to the right of the crackling log fire. Richard and Mutina Starkweather, fingers entwined, occupied the lounge before the fireplace, while I sat opposite Costello. In the center, back to the blaze, small blue eyes flashing and dancing with excitement, tiny waxed mustache quivering like the whiskers of an irritable tom-cat, Jules de Grandin stood with his feet well apart, eyeing us in rapid succession. “Observe, my friends,” he commanded, thrusting his hand into the inside pocket of his dinner coat and fishing out a newspaper stone proof some four inches by eight inches in size; “is it not the grand surprise I have prepared for our evil-eyed friends?”
With a grandiloquent bow he handed me the paper, bidding me read it aloud. In boldface type the notice announced:
CHEZ LA PONTOUFLE DORÉE
ENGAGEMENT EXTRAORDINARY!
The Sensation of the Year!
La Belle Mutina, former High Priestess of
The Rakshasas
Will Positively Appear at this Club
During the Supper Hour
Tomorrow Night!
La Mutina, Far-famed Malayan Beauty,
Will Perform the Notorious
DANCE OF THE INDONG MUTINA
Disclosing for the First Time
in the Western Hemisphere
The Devilish Rites of the Rakshasas
(Reservations for this extraordinary attraction
will positively not be received
by mail or telephone.)
I glanced at Mutina, sitting demurely beside her husband, then at the exuberant little Frenchman. “All right, what does it mean?” I asked.
“Ah, my friends, what does it not mean?” he replied with
a wave of his hand. “Attend me—carefully, if you please:
“Last night at the club, when the good Madame took pity on us and lightened our darkness with the lovely presence of Madame Mutina, I was enchanted. When Madame Mutina invited our attention to the pussy-faced evil ones seated at the corner table I was enraged. When we proceeded to Madame Mutina’s house and beheld the new-dead stretched so quietly and pitifully there, the spilled blood crying aloud to heaven—and me—for vengeance, parbleu, I was greatly interested.
“My friends, the little feet of Jules de Grandin have covered much territory. Where the eternal snow of the northland fly forever before the ceaseless gales, I have been there. Where the sun burns and burns like the fire of the fundamentalists’ hell, there have I been. Nowhere, no land, is a stranger to me. And on my many travels I have kept my mind, my eyes and my ears widely open. Ah, I have heard the muted mumblings of the dwellers round Sierra Leone, while the frightened blacks crouch in their cabins and scarce breathe the name of the human leopards for fear of dreadful vengeance. In Haiti I have beheld the unclean rites of voudois and witnessed the power of papaloi and mamaloi. The djinns and efreets of Araby, the dracus, werewolves and vampires of Hungary, Russia and Rumania, the bhuts of India—I know them all. Also I have been in the Malay Archipelago, and know the rakshasas. Certainly.
“Consider, my friends: There is no wonder-tale which affrights mankind after the lights are lit which has not its foundation in present or past fact. The legends of the loves of Zeus with mortal women, his liaisons with Danaë, Io and Europa, they are but ancestral memories of the bad old days when wicked immortals—incubi, if you please—worked their evil will on humanity. In the Middle Ages, when faith burned more brightly than at present, men saw more clearly. Recall the story of Robert le Diable, scion of Bertha, a human woman, and Bertramo, a foul fiend disguised as a worthy knight. Remember how this misfortunate Robert was the battleground of his mother’s gentle nature and his sire’s fiendishness; then consider our poor Madame Mutina.
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