“Arabic—Hindustani?” I echoed incredulously. “What would that be doing on a man’s forehead—”
“Tiens, mon vieux, what would a man be doing falling dead in the street, with or without an inscription cut into his brow? Le bon Dieu knows, not I. Did not it seem to you he fled from something—”
“No, it didn’t,” I denied. “It seemed to me that he was drunk and didn’t know what he was doing. Certainly, he wasn’t watching his step—”
“Agreed,” he nodded. “Most certainly he had not his wits about him, but few people in extremis do. However, let us wait the findings of the coroner. Our first concern is to find a telephone.”
I JERKED THE SILVER-PLATED handle of the old-fashioned bell-pull vigorously, and from somewhere in the rear of the house came a responsive brassy tinkle, but no more. “Grand Dieu des porcs,” de Grandin swore, “are we to be kept waiting while they rise and make a toilette like that of Marie Antoinette? Hola dans la maison!” he supplemented my ring with a vigorous thump upon the walnut panel of the door. “Awake, arouse yourselves within!” he shouted, and as he struck the door a second time a light click sounded and the portal swung back under the impact of his knuckles.
I hesitated on the threshold, but de Grandin had no scruples about violating the householders’ privacy. “Hola!” he exclaimed again as he stepped over the sill. “Is there no one here to—morbleu!” he broke off, then, in a lower tone, “Pas possible? In such a neighborhood? Regardez, if you please, Friend Trowbridge.”
We stood upon the entrance of a wide, long hall with frescoed ceiling and tall doors of massive walnut letting off to right and left. In the softly diffused light of a bronze-shaded Oriental lamp it seemed unreal as a stage setting—Persian, Indian and Chinese rugs almost hid the polished planking of the floor, more rugs, glowing with jewel-colors shading from pale jade to deepest ruby, draped along the walls. Where the white and mahogany balustrade of a wide staircase curved upward a peacock screen had been set, and immediately in front of it was a carved divan of inlaid blackwood. By the divan stood a tabouret of Indian cedar inlaid with copper, and on it, still emitting a thin plume of steam, a tiny cup of eggshell porcelain rested. Over everything there hung a heavy, heady, almost drugging perfume—ambergris.
“Tenez,” de Grandin clicked his tongue against his teeth as he surveyed the apartment, “he is like a diamond set in brass or a pearl in a pig’s snout, a room like this in such a neighborhood, n’est-ce-pas? One wonders—ah-ha? Ah-ha-ha?” His voice sank to a whisper as he nodded toward the stairway.
The blackwood divan just beneath the stairs was spread with leopard skin, and lying indolently on it was a woman, one arm extended toward us, wrist bent, hand drooping. Beneath her fingers coiled the brass stem of a hookah she had evidently let drop when she slipped off to sleep, and from the brass tobacco-cup that topped the cloisonné water-jar of the hubble-bubble the faintest coil of scented smoke ascended.
I had an odd feeling of unreality, a sort of this-can’t-possibly-be-true sensation as I looked at her. She matched her surroundings as perfectly as if she had been made up for a part, and the big, gorgeous, dimly lighted room were the stage on which she played it. Small she was, almost childishly so, and dainty as a sweetly molded porcelain figurine. But her body was a woman’s, not a child’s. The turn of her bare arms, the firm rondure of her breasts, spoke full maturity. Her skin was golden with the warm, glow of sun-ripened fruit, her nose was small and slightly hawk-beaked, her forehead low and wide. Her hair was black and sooty, without luster, parted smoothly in the middle and drawn down like wings above her ears, and the pandanus-red mouth was full-lipped, sensual and petulant, suggesting quick transitions from gay laughter to storms of anger, like that of a willful child.
A short, tight bodice of plum-colored satin like a zouave jacket covered but in nowise concealed the luscious fullness of her bosoms, from waist to ankles she was encased in exaggeratedly full pantaloons of saffron-yellow muslin drawn in tightly at the bottoms and ending in a triple row of fluffy ruffles. About her neck and wrists and ankles circled strands of gold discs almost large as pennies set with uncut rubies and off-color diamonds, and from each plate hung a tiny golden sleigh-bell. In her left nostril was a hoop of gold large and heavy as a wedding ring, and balanced on the tip of one small foot was a green-velvet heel-less slipper thickly worked with gold embroidery and seed-pearls. Its mate had fallen to the rug-strewn floor, baring a tiny blue-veined foot the heel and sole and toes of which were stained bright red with henna.
“Pardonnez-moi, Madame,” de Grandin began, speaking softly so as not to waken her abruptly. “We regret the intrusion, but—ah?” We had been walking toward the sleeping woman, our footsteps soundless on the rug-spread floor, now we stood beside her. Her heavy-lashed, kohl-shadowed lids were not quite closed. A little thread of white showed between them, and her petulantly sensuous mouth was lax and drooping at the corners, as though she was unutterably tired. “Morbleu,” he exclaimed, and his voice rasped as if his throat were sandy, “another?”
“How—” I began, but he shut me off impatiently. “Par la barbe d’un bouc vert do not you see it, my friend? There is something devilish here!” Scratched on the smooth, pale-amber skin of her forehead were the same shorthand-like characters we had found on the brow of the dead man in the street.
“What can it mean?” I wondered. “The wounds are fresh—the man, was still bleeding, this was probably made after death, for there’s no evidence of hemorrhage, but she can’t have been dead long. The coffee cup is still steaming, the hookah is smoking—”
“God and the devil know, not we, my friend,” the little Frenchmen answered. “This case is not for the coroner alone. It is a matter for the police and the public prosecutor. Unless I am far more mistaken than I think, this is a matter of murder.”
“YOU FELLERS DO SEND in the damnedest cases,” complained Dr. Jason Parnell, the coroner’s physician. “I don’t mind ’em when they’re messed up some, or even when they’re ripe from bein’ in the Bay too long, but when they’re dead without a single, solitary reason—”
“How do you say?” de Grandin demanded. “Is it that you could not make a diagnosis?”
“That’s a rough outline of the plot. A first-year student knows that death begins in one of three ways: Coma, starting at the brain; asphyxia, beginning at the lungs, or syncope, commencing at the heart. Those bodies you found have no right to be dead. There’s absolutely nothing diagnostic. No trace of coma, syncope or asphyxia. The man had a slight touch of TB, but he’d have been good for another five years, anyway. The woman showed traces of drug-addiction, but nothing which could account for her death. Except for those dam’, insignificant scratches on their foreheads neither of ’em had a thing wrong with him; certainly nothing that the wildest stretch of imagination could call fatal. Hearts, lungs, brains all intact, no trace of any known poison, nothing serious the matter with ’em, except that they’re both dead as herrings.”
“Ye say there wuzn’t any trace o’ poison, sor?” Lieutenant Costello of the Homicide Bureau asked in disappointment. “Sure, that’s too bad entirely. I’d kind o’ built me case around them scratches on their foreheads—”
“I didn’t say there was no trace of poison,” Parnell denied tartly. “I said there was no trace of known poison. Generally speaking, poisons fall into three categories: corrosives, such as phenol or carbolic acid, hydrocyanic acid, or oxalic acid; hypnotics and antipyretics, such as the derivatives of opium, alcohol, chloroform and the like; and alkaloidals, which affect the central nervous system, among which many snake venoms are to be found. Usually we suspect some class of poison from the physical appearance of the body. From a general classification we descend to particulars, gradually eliminating one suspected toxin, then another, till we’ve narrowed our investigation down to the particular poison causing death. Like you, when I found nothing radically wrong with these peoples’ hearts or lungs or brains I suspected poison had been int
roduced into their systems through those scratches on their foreheads, but I drew a blank there, too.
“The area around the wounds should have been swollen, red and inflamed if snake venom had been introduced; these scratches seemed to have no effect on surrounding tissue, and specimens taken from them proved almost completely sterile. If one of the vegetable poisons such as curare had been injected symptoms similar to snake-bite would have been noticed, but as I said there were none. Furthermore, tests made on the blood and tissues yielded negative results. None of the familiar reactions was noted. All this, of course, does not preclude the possibility of poisoning. It merely means no poison known to me was used.”
“Uh-huh,” agreed Costello doubtfully. “What’re ye goin’ to tell the jury wuz the cause o’ death, sor?”
Dr. Parnell drew out his wallet and extracted a ten-dollar bill which he laid on the desk before the policeman. “If you’ll tell me what I should tell ’em that’s yours, Lieutenant,” he offered.
“Tenez, my friends, I think we waste the time,” de Grandin broke in. “The key to this accursed mystery must lie under some doormat. Our task is to discover which one.”
“True fer ye, sor,” agreed Costello. “All we gotta do is find out why two people who didn’t die from any known cause is dead, an’ who kilt ’em, an’ why. Afther that it’s all simple. Where do we start turnin’ up them doormats ye was spakin’ of, I dunno?”
The little Frenchman took his narrow chin between his thumb and forefinger. “The markings on their brows are identical,” he murmured. “It they had been different it might have meant something, or nothing. Their identity undoubtlessly means something, also, but what?” Abruptly he turned on us, small, round blue eyes blazing almost angrily. “Why do we stand here?” he demanded. “Why do we not go to consult the good Ram Chitra Das at once, right away, immediately?”
“WELL, WELL, THIS IS an unexpected pleasure!” our Hindu friend greeted as we trooped into his apartment in East Eighty-sixth Street. He and his charming wife were lunching on the tiny tiled terrace that let off of the dining room of their maisonette, a spot of grateful coolness in the sweltering city. A red-and-white striped awning kept the mid-September sun at bay, the tiled floor was a cool gray-green underfoot, at the terrace edge a row of scarlet geraniums nodded in the light breeze fanning in from the East River. The buhl table from which they ate was itself a museum piece, and the covered dishes of Georgian Sheffield plate were, I noted enviously, the kind about which antique dealers dream. Steam spiraled lazily from the swan’s-neck spout of a teapot under which a spirit lamp burned, iced grapefruit, chops, scrambled eggs and buttered toast had just been set before them, and at the far side of the table, beaded like the forehead of a farmhand on a summer day, a tall, inviting bottle of Rhine wine waited.
“Had luncheon?” asked our host. “Yes? That’s a pity. We’d love to have you join us, but perhaps you’d take a cup o’ tea?”
He smiled at the woman who sat facing us. “You remember Drs. Trowbridge and de Grandin, and Lieutenant Costello, my dear?”
Nairini inclined her head in a bow that included us jointly, and there was something queenly in the movement. I knew that she had been an Indian prince’s daughter who had eloped from her bridegroom’s palace with Ram Chitra, Das, himself the grandson of a rajah and as engaging a scapegrace as ever backslid from the ancient Hindu faith and took service with His Britannic Majesty.
They were an oddly contrasting, yet completely complementary couple, these renegade children of Mother India. In his gray flannels with the bright stripes of his school tie in bold contrast, Ram Chitra Das looked anything but a Hindu. He might have been a Spaniard or Italian, perhaps a Basque or Portuguese, but there was nothing Oriental in his clear-olive complexion, his sleekly brushed black hair and humorous, alert dark eyes.
Nairini, on the contrary, could never have been mistaken for a Westerner. Her skin was an incredibly beautiful tan, as if it had been powdered with the finest gold, her eyes of deep, moss-agate green were set a trifle slantingly, and her hair, demurely parted in the middle and gathered in a great coil at the back was a dull black cloud. Her mouth was an extraordinary color, like the darker sort of strawberries. Her dress of block-printed linen, chocolate-brown on cocoa-tan, was sleeveless and reached to her ankles, about her waist was a girdle of amber beads as large as hazel nuts. There were bracelets of frail silver filigree on her wrists, jade-and-silver pendants hung in her ears; a soft, musical cling-clong sounded as she moved slightly, and we saw the slender bare ankles above her sandaled feet were ringed with heavy circlets of sand-molded silver.
With a grace that made the simple act seem like the art of a skilled dancer she poured tea for us, and Ram Chitra Das demanded, “I suppose you chaps are in trouble again? We never see you when the sailin’s clear.”
“Not so much in trouble as puzzled, my friend,” de Grandin denied. “Last night Friend Trowbridge and I found two people dead without excuse.”
Ram Chitra Das bent a mild frown upon the little Frenchman. “Let’s see if I follow you. D’ye mean you’d no excuse for findin’ ’em, or the late lamented had no adequate excuse for dyin’?”
“Both, par les bois d’une huître!” Briefly de Grandin sketched our adventure of the night before, ending with Parnell’s failure to ascribe a cause of death.
“H’m.” Ram Chitra Das helped himself to more scrambled egg and spread strawberry jam on his toast. “You say the scars on their foreheads looked like writin’? Sounds as if some o’ my former fellow countrymen might have been up to tricks. Can you recall what the scars looked like?”
“By blue, I can, my friend. I have here an exact copy.” The Frenchman drew a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to Ram Chitra Das.
“Sivanavama!” For a moment our host’s hand shook as he looked at the sketch, but in a moment it had steadied.
Nairini’s delicately arched brows rose a trifle higher. “What is it?” she asked in her clear, smooth contralto that somehow reminded me of the cooing of doves.
“I fear, old dear, that this is it.” Her husband’s voice was so casual that we knew he held hysteria in check by an effort as he passed the slip of paper to her.
“Oom Parvati!” The superb gentility that comes from hundreds of generations of royal blood stood Nairini in good stead, but in the sudden widening of her pupils and the quick expansion of her narrow nostrils we read fear.
“Ah-ha!” de Grandin barked. “You know him? You recognize him, hein?”
Ram Chitra Das nodded grimly. “We know him very well indeed.”
“And what, if one may ask, does he mean, this writing?”
“Oh, the writing? Literally translated it means ‘The Afghan.’”
“Vraiment? And who would this so odious Afghan be?”
Ram Chitra Das’ dark eyes were serious as he turned them on de Grandin. “You know something about me,” he returned. “You know my father was a prince’s son who made a misalliance with a nautchni and went into a not too onerous exile as a consequence, you know about my education. I was brought up as a high caste Brahmin lad and in addition had some trainin’ under fakirs who, as the saying goes, could ‘teach tricks to a fox.’ They certainly taught me some things that have come in very handy. My English education was interrupted by the World War, but when I came back from France I took my degree at Oxford and topped it off with a year at the Sorbonne.”
The grin with which he broke his recital had something of a small-boy-at-the-circus quality. “So there I was, schooled Orientally and Occidentally, restless with the restlessness of all demobbed soldiers, and with not a blessed thing to do. My caste had been completely smashed by my trip across the ocean and such indiscretions as eating beef, and after fourteen years of European life in peace and war Brahma, Vishnu and Siva meant no more to me than Pegasus or Apollo, nor had I filled this vacuum of disbelief by embracing Christianity, though several parsons and the Lord knows how many nice old ladies had labored manfu
lly to bring me into the fold. I didn’t need to work, my income was sufficient for my needs and almost equal to my wants, but I was bored. Bored stiff. I got so tired of being just Ram Chitra Das, idler, that I took service with the Intelligence Section of the Indian Police.
“I don’t think that I’m boastin’ when I say they got a bargain in me. I spoke every dialect that’s used between Colombo and Kabul, and since I owed allegiance to no formal brand of religion and had no caste to be broken I could masquerade as a Hindu, Mohammedan, Jain, Buddhist, Sikh or Parsee without embarrassment. I gave ’em twenty-seven shillin’s’ worth for every pound they paid me. Besides, I had a lot of fun.”
Then suddenly he drew his brows down and the whole aspect of his face changed. “They gave me an assignment to keep an eye on Karowlee Sahib, the pershwa of Bahadupore. He was a tricky old cuss, this Raja Karowlee, somewhere about fifty, more wives than any other possessions—though they said he used about ten pecks o’ diamonds for playthings. When he’s not thinkin’ of women it’s treason; makin’ deals with Russia or the Afghans, anyone who’ll play his game and give him a leg up with his schemes. That’s how he got his nickname, The Afghan. He’d spent almost a year up north o’ Kabul tryin’ to sell one of those Afghan amirs the idea of comin’ down and botherin’ the Raja while he pulled off his local revolution, and when he came back he had a pack o’ Afghan wolfhounds, a lot less money than he took away, and his beard dyed red with henna, Afghan fashion. He’d had no luck with the hillmen, though. Seems the amir’s son had served with the British and seen the R.A.P. in action. He wasn’t havin’ any trouble with those babies.
“Well, as I was sayin’, I was up Bahadupore way, posin’ as a free-lance soldier and servin’ as a lieutenant in Karowlee’s guard when word comes that the Princess Mihri Nairini—that means Nairini the Beloved—was comin’ up from Bhutanistan, where her father was in the king business in a small way, to marry this old reprobate Karowlee. Women didn’t mean much to me in those days. I’d been petted by the English ladies and the French girls were nice to me, too, but I’d never seen one who could lure me into exchangin’ ridin’ boots and polo mallet for slippers and a pipe. Besides, I’d absorbed European ideas. This Princess Nairini was a ‘native,’ probably ate with her fingers and couldn’t read or write. I’d seen her kind a thousand times, and the more I saw of ’em the more I thought my pater had the right idea when he married a nautchni. Then—” he paused with a slow, reminiscent smile, and Nairini cut in softly:
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