by Matthew Head
“I tell you I’ve got it tied in already,” she said.
“What do you know that I don’t know?” I asked. “What have you found out in the way of—figures, that you haven’t told me?”
“Nothing,” she said. “A lot of what I know you told me. The rest you saw as well as I did.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re a nice kid, Hoopie,” Mary Finney told me, “but you’re blind as a bat. I’ll tell you when it’s time.”
I had to let it go at that until we got to the village.
It was a miserable affair, two rows of thatched huts, circular, with conical roofs, and all around them the earth had been beaten to dust by the natives’ feet. They had kept the bush chopped away for about fifty feet on each side of the village area, but then a tangle of low growth began, gradually rising into the tall trees and hanging lianas of full forest. We stopped at the edge of the first row of huts and stood looking along the squalid alleyway.
The sun was blazing down and the air felt compressed between the hills that rose on every side. The dust we had stirred up hung around our ankles, wavering gently, but outside of that there wasn’t a sign of anything moving, nor a sound, except what we could hear of the perpetual whispering and peeping of the forest.
“There’s nobody here,” I said.
“Oh yes there is,” said Miss Finney. “Look over there.” She pointed to a hut about midway along the stretch of village. There was something sitting on the ground on the shady side. “Too old to take along,” Miss Finney said, and started forward. I followed her until we got up close to the old woman.
She was certainly the ugliest of all God’s forsaken creatures. Her skin was like something smoked and dried and flaky with ashes, covered with the grayish scale you find on all old natives. She was only a sack for her twisted old bones, with a heavy load of entrails settled into the bottom of it, and strange, badly padded appendages for arms and legs. She looked up at us with a sick monkey face and blinked her eyes once, slowly. That was all. She was sick and old, but she must have had behind her a good record in child-bearing, with the respect and the worldly goods that come with it, for in addition to the standard beaten-bark G-string, she had accumulated during her lifetime an armband of tinny metal eight or nine inches wide, and four or five strings of bright glass beads that hung around her neck with plenty of amulets and one large heavy metal pendant. Her G-string held a long shiny knife over the withered hump that had been her right buttock, and she supported a clay pipe in one hand. As we watched her she gathered enough energy to lift it ever so slowly to her mouth, and to take ever so slow a puff. Her arm fell back then, and to all outward appearances she died and froze squatting there. She had big white skewers in her ears. There was a dark spot moving out of the next hut now, like something sub-animal, and as naked, but recognizable as another female. When I moved toward it, it stopped and sank down on its haunches. I pulled a coin out of my pocket, a small one with a hole in the center, and held it out to her. Like a piece of leather coming to life she raised her eyelids, and finally she raised her hand. It was covered with raw white spots. I dropped the coin into it and she looked at it without expression. Her fingers oozed into a fist over the coin and she remained squatting there, blinking in the light. “There’ll be a few more in the huts,” Miss Finney said, “all just like these.” She stood in the dust in the middle of the village, looking around every which way. After the first glance she didn’t pay any more attention to the two hunks of dormant flesh. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head and said, “They’ve sure cleared out. This is just like old times.”
She took a deep breath and cupped both hands to her mouth, and called through them, a few bizarre syllables, in the direction of the bush. We stood there listening, but everything remained quiet.
“They’ve had the living daylights scared out of them,” she said. “They’ll do it every time—or used to. Used to be, every time we showed up we’d find the villages deserted, just like this. That was a long time ago, though. Only time I’ve seen it since those days was during the rebellion.”
After a few moments she called again, a long loud hornlike call. She waited halfheartedly, apparently not really expecting an answer, and then turned to me.
“You’ll have to leave, Hoop,” she said. “I don’t stand a dog’s chance of getting them out while you’re here. They’re not very far in. They’re watching us right now. I’ll be back at the station as soon as I can make it.”
“You can’t stay here alone, in the middle of this ring of savages,” I said. “I’m going to stay.”
She smiled, a very good smile, wide, pleased, and friendly, but she said, “If they were going to hurt us we’d have been cut into slivers by now. I’ll see you later. Remember every word everybody says, and don’t let any two of them get together alone.”
“You’re the boss,” I said, and turned to go, but she called me back suddenly and said, “Hoopie, have you got a handkerchief?” I reached into the hip pocket where I always carry one, but it was gone.
“I thought not,” said Miss Finney. “Think that one over.” She grinned and I knew she was teasing me about something but I didn’t know what.
“I hope you’re having a lot of fun,” I said. “I’ll have the truck waiting for you.”
As I mounted the path I turned to look back at her. She had moved over to the shade and was sitting on a log drum at the side of a hut, fanning herself with her helmet. I could almost feel the natives moving cautiously to the edge of the bush as I left the village behind me, but all the way back to the limits of the station, and then through the station grounds to the Boutegourdes’, I didn’t see a soul.
Miss Finney arrived about an hour after I did. She had the back of the truck full of natives and said some of the house boys were coming on foot. The boys in the truck got out and huddled in a group, their eyes wide and white, watching Miss Finney as if their lives depended on not losing sight of her.
CHAPTER SIX
—or Parties Unknown
I DON’T KNOW EXACTLY when it was that I began to see that Miss Finney was intent on tightening the ring of circumstance around Henri. But even when I got to the point where I was willing to admit to myself that Henri was mixed up in the business somehow, or at least knew something he was hiding, the puzzling thing was still why anybody would want to kill the de l’Andréneau brothers at all. I couldn’t make head nor tail of the things that happened, and if it was all part of a worked-out scheme, the scheme seemed too complicated to be reasonable. On the other hand it was simple enough at its face value, André having died of amoebic dysentery, and a couple of weeks later an entirely unconnected event, Gérôme’s death at the hands of the M’bukus, their revenge for his having hanged one of them. Revenge isn’t a common motive for premeditated murder among civilized people, story books to the contrary, but it’s the commonest one among primitive ones.
But Miss Finney insisted that anybody with eyes in his head wouldn’t be fooled, and she didn’t consider for a minute that the natives had anything to do with it. It is hard from this distance to understand why any of us were fooled, but in the time that has elapsed, the things that were actually connected with the murders have stuck with me, while other impressions have faded. And of course after you once know the straight of anything you wonder how you could have thought anything else.
I’ve already told Henri’s story—that he had fallen asleep in his clothes around eight o’clock and had slept until he had been awakened to find Dodo, just as Miss Finney and I came up.
As for the rest of them, Miss Collins had had a light supper with the three Boutegourdes and they had all sat around for a while in the living room. Then at about eight o’clock she had said good night and gone to bed. She had read her Bible for half an hour, as she did every night, and then had gone to sleep and slept soundly until she had been awakened by all the rumpus in the living room. When she came in, Papa and Madame Boute
gourde were lifting Jacqueline up off the floor where she had fallen into the room, and were laying her out on the couch. I had arrived a few minutes later.
Papa and Madame Boutegourde said that after Miss Collins had gone to bed at eight o’clock, they had stayed up playing a few hands of piquet for another hour, and then they had gone to bed too. They had slept until Jacqueline came screaming into the house.
All this was simple enough, but Gabrielle’s story was more complicated. She had been moping around all evening, seeming restless and unhappy, and when Madame Boutegourde was ready for bed she told Gabrielle that she had better go to bed too, and reminded her that she had had a headache that morning. Gabrielle said she wasn’t sleepy, because she had been kept in bed until noon. She laid out a table of solitaire with the cards Papa and Madame Boutegourde had been playing with, and promised her mother that she would go to bed after a few hands. She didn’t go to bed, though; she played solitaire until she couldn’t stand it any longer, she said, then she decided she would smoke a cigarette. She didn’t ordinarily smoke so she didn’t carry cigarettes, but Papa Boutegourde always had some. She slipped into her parents’ bedroom and found the cigarettes in her father’s shirt pocket. Papa Boutegourde was snoring lightly and Madame was breathing evenly by his side. When Miss Finney told Gabrielle that it was important for her to remember absolutely everything, Gabrielle knotted her brows for a minute and said, “Well, then, if it makes any difference, I forgot to get Papa’s matches, and I was afraid I might wake them if I went in again so soon, so I went back to the kitchen for a match and lit my cigarette there.” She told her whole story in similar detail. She had to pass Miss Collins’s door on the way to the kitchen. It was open to get the cross-draft but she didn’t look in. “Why should I?” she said. She came back through the house and went out onto the front porch to smoke. She turned out all the lights because it was a pretty night and she wanted to feel alone, and she felt more alone outside and in the dark. She had sat down on the steps for a while, but there were so many mosquitoes that she had got up, and paced up and down the porch. It was a very small porch, and as she told her story I had the picture of her, tense and distraught, taking the few steps the length of the porch, then turning, taking a few steps, turning, and always puffing on the cigarette in the fast uneasy way she had of smoking. The mosquitoes were so bad that even walking didn’t keep them off her legs, so she threw the cigarette away and went back into the house. Just then she heard a car in the distance; she had glanced at the clock as she turned on the living-room light, but she didn’t remember the exact time—it was a little after ten, she thought.
She knew the car must be Jacqueline getting back, and this made her feel worse than ever. She felt lonesome, and wanted company so much that she started back to wake Miss Collins, but she thought better of it and returned to the living room. The sound of the car had died away; she knew Jacqueline was at Gérôme’s by now, and she hated the thought of having to be around her again. Then she did something that she frequently did, she said, that she had learned from Jeannette while she was alive. Jeannette used to memorize poetry to occupy herself when she was unhappy or restless, and she had taught Gabrielle to do it. Gabrielle went to her own room and picked out an anthology that Jeannette had given her. She memorized a verse by Guillaume Apollinaire:
Je passais au bord de la Seine
Un livre ancien sous le bras
Le fleuve est pareil à ma peine
Il s’écoule et ne tarit pas
Quand donc finira la semaine
It was a sad, quiet little verse and made her feel better, but it took only a few minutes to memorize, and she had begun on a sonnet by Louise Labé:
Baise m’encor, rebaise moy et baise:
Donne m’en un de tes plus savoureus,
Donne m’en un de tes plus amoureus:
This one hadn’t gone so well, and she had flung the book down and decided to try to get some sleep after all. She lay in bed unable to do anything but think, and although she didn’t say so, I could imagine what she was thinking about, mulling it all over in her head about the night before. Finally she got up and put on her clothes again and went out. She said she had been moving around so much that night that she was afraid she might have disturbed her parents, and so she slipped out of her window instead of going through the front room again.
She had gone out to the promontory.
“Why there ?” asked Madame Boutegourde, while Gabrielle was telling this.
“For the view,” said Gabrielle. “The grass fires were pretty.”
She had told all this calmly enough, but she had all she could do to keep from going to pieces as she told the rest of it. She had sat there for a while, she didn’t know how long, until she had heard the sound of someone coming. She had run back into the edge of the bush, and had seen one figure come out onto the promontory, bent over under the weight of what he carried on his back. He had thrown his weight onto the ground. The body was long and thin and in white pants and shirt; she knew it was Gérôme. She could see the other figure in not much more than silhouette, but she could tell it was a native. She had shut her eyes when she saw that he had a knife, and what he was doing to the body; she was afraid she would faint, and concentrated everything on staying conscious and quiet. She didn’t know how long it took until the native left, going down the path into the valley, toward the village; she didn’t remember how long it had taken her to go back along the path when she saw my light in the distance. She thought it was a native, with a light he had stolen. She had told him not to touch her, and then had recognized me when I turned the flash on myself. She showed me Gérôme’s body, as I have told, and I took her back to her house, where Miss Finney was still trying to get something besides gibberish out of Jacqueline.
When I told them that I had found Gérôme, and that he was dead, Jacqueline went into violent hysterics again and Miss Finney had to give her a hypodermic right away. But Miss Finney told Gabrielle that she had to keep hold of herself long enough to tell exactly what had happened. While Miss Collins put Jacqueline to bed, Gabrielle told us her story as I’ve just set it down. It was hard for her to do, and you could see her hanging onto herself for dear life near the end of it, but it was Madame Boutegourde who finally gave way and had to be attended to next by Miss Finney.
I didn’t have anything to add to all this. As I’ve said, we spent the rest of that night moving Gérôme’s body into the laboratory, until Miss Finney and I had gone back to Henri’s. Miss Finney only asked me one question.
“Hoop,” she said, as we drove down to Henri’s, “what exactly did Gaby say, when you flashed that light on her?”
“Just what she said she said,” I told her. “She just kept saying, Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, over and over again.”
“Those her exact words?”
“You asked me, I told you. Yes.”
“Strange,” said Miss Finney. “If she didn’t know it was you, why did she speak in English?”
I felt myself flushing in the dark. “Sorry,” I said. “She did say it in French, now that I think of it.”
“Damnit,” said Miss Finney, “when I say exact words, I mean exact words.”
“All right then, her exact words were Ne me touchez pas.”
“The next time I ask you a question, see that you answer it correctly the first time,” said Miss Finney.
“Yes, ma’am,” I agreed.
It wasn’t until Gabrielle and Madame Boutegourde had left the next morning for Costermansville that Miss Finney set about the job of getting Jacqueline out of bed and getting her story in rational form. Jacqueline had a field day. If the shades of Bernhardt and Rachel and all the other girls who have their portraits in the lobbies of the Comédie-Française were listening in, they must have been awe-struck.
In the first place, after doing a good job on the breakfast-lunch that Miss Finney and Miss Collins took in to her on a tray, Jacqueline said she simply could not go on, simply could n
ot, until she had had a chance to freshen up in her own room. Miss Finney wanted the story at Gérôme’s anyway, where the thing had happened, so she and Jacqueline and I went down there. Papa Boutegourde and Henri and Miss Collins stayed behind. Some of the natives Miss Finney had brought back with her were getting a grave dug. It turned out that there was no film on the station, so photographs were out, but Papa Boutegourde and Henri had agreed to sew the body in the canvas, and we would all see that it was properly buried that afternoon, with Miss Collins reading a burial service. In the meanwhile Miss Finney would get Jacqueline’s story. Henri and Papa Boutegourde looked surprised when Miss Finney said I was to come along with her, but nobody said anything.
Jacqueline had a hard time being a tragic figure on the way down to her house. She had asked for lipstick and mascara with her lunch tray, but either there was none in the house or Miss Finney had maliciously lied about it, so Jacqueline had to make her first entrance in the torn and bedraggled red crêpe pajamas without make-up. It added easily five years to her looks, and while her pallor was real enough it was only unhealthy, not dramatic.
After we got to Gérôme’s, she kept Miss Finney and me waiting close to three quarters of an hour while she “freshened up.” Miss Finney poked her nose into everything in the living room and then looked over the hallway and all the other rooms not within Jacqueline’s hearing. Nothing but the living room was messed up. The throw-rugs were rumpled on the waxed concrete floor, and although two brandy glasses were standing upright on the table, the open brandy bottle had overturned and the room was filled with its sharp, grapy smell. While I smoked cigarettes and watched her, Miss Finney finished our period of waiting by going around and around the living room like a bumblesome old dog trying to search out a bone. She would mutter under her breath and I got the idea that most of what she said was pretty uncomplimentary to our hostess.
