The Dark Angel

by Seabury Quinn

  The little Frenchman nodded thoughtfully; then: “Suppose we go and see that all is well before we take a good-night drink,” he suggested. “It was I who urged her to perform that dance tonight; I would not have my conscience tell me I had failed to give protection to her in case she suffered injury.”

  The street in which Helen Fisk lodged was flanked by double rows of narrow, tall brick houses, flat-fronted, monotonous, uniform as a company of grenadiers. As I drew my car to a halt beneath the lamp post which stood before the lodging-house, a uniformed policeman suddenly materialized from the darkness, glanced inquiringly at de Grandin and me, then saluted smartly as he recognized Costello.

  “Everything O.K., O’Donnell?” the sergeant asked.

  “Yes, sir; quiet as a graveyard at midnight, so far,” the officer replied. “I ain’t even seen a—”

  A sudden burst of light, dazzling as a very flare, followed by the sharp, staccato rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire cut short his words.

  “Glory be to God!” Costello cried. “What th’ hell—”

  Dragging at the pistol in his shoulder-holster, he hastened down the street toward the intersecting roadway whence the disturbance came, followed full-tilt by Officer O’Donnell. A moment later another form emerged from the shadow of the house and the street lamp glittered momentarily on brass buttons and silver shield as the patrolman who had mounted guard at the rear hurried past to join Costello and O’Donnell in the chase.

  “Par la barbe d’un poisson vert,” began de Grandin; then:

  “Up, my friend; up quickly; I fear it is a ruse to draw away the guards; we must act quickly!” Fairly dragging me by a reluctant elbow, he rushed up the short flight of brownstone steps leading to the rooming-house door, pressed upon the panels with an impatient hand and stepped quickly into the dimly lighted hall.

  “You see?” he asked in a fierce whisper. “The door is unlocked—open! How comes it?” For a brief instant he bent to examine the fastenings; then:

  “Observe him, my friend,” he commanded. Looking where he pointed I descried a thin wedge of wood, like a match-stick sharpened to a point, thrust into the Yale lock, making it impossible for the latch to fly into position when the catch had been released. “Diablerie!” he muttered. “Costello and the others, they have gone in chase of the wild goose. Come, we must find Mademoiselle Hélène right away, at once.”

  “I heard her say she lived on the third floor,” I whispered, “but whether front or back I don’t—”

  “No matter,” he cut in. “We shall find her—prie Dieu we find her first! Up, my friend; mount the front stairs, while I go up the back. We shall meet at the top floor, and should you see another coming down, detain him at all costs. We can not take the chances, now.”

  He scuttled down the hall and let himself through the swing-door which communicated with the kitchen, waving encouragement and haste to me as he disappeared.

  Walking as softly as I could, I crept up the stairs leading to the second floor, began ascending the narrow, spiral flight which gave access to the top story, at last, rather out of breath, paused at the entrance to the long and narrow hallway which bisected the third floor of the house.

  Although there were two fixtures set into the wall, only a single electric bulb was burning, and by its rather feeble glow I discerned narrow, white-enameled doors opening to right and left upon the corridor, like staterooms on the passage in a steamship cabin. The place was utterly untenanted, not even a mouse disputing my possession. A moment I paused, waiting for de Grandin; then, as no sign of him appeared, I took a tentative step or two toward the rear of the house, ears attuned for his step upon the stairs.

  A faint, light click, like the slipping of a well-oiled lock, sounded at my back, and as I turned something whistled past my face, a sharp pop! sounded, and the electric bulb burst with a little spurt of fire. Next moment the hallway was drowned in devastating, smothering darkness.

  Half terrified, I paused a moment in my tracks; then, fumbling for my matchcase, I struck a light and held the little torch above my head.

  “Oh!” I exclaimed involuntarily, shrinking back a step. Creeping stealthily on hands and knees, like in obscene and monstrously overgrown spider, was a man, a small, scrawny, dark-visaged man, silent as a snake in his sinister progress. As the matchlight shone momentarily on him it glinted eerily on the blade of a short curved dagger clenched between his teeth. Brief as my inspection was, I recognized him as one of the quartet of Hindoos we had seen in the theater.

  For a moment I stood frozen, aghast; then, marshaling my courage, I challenged sharply: “Halt—stand where you are, or I’ll shoot!” Reaching in my waistcoat pocket, I clicked the cover of my glasses-case, hoping desperately that it simulated the sound of a revolver being cocked.

  A low, soft laugh, sinister as the hissing of a serpent, answered me, and the fellow rose to his feet, raising his hands level with his ears and grinning at me maliciously. “Will the sahib shoot me, then?” he asked, letting the knife fall from between his teeth. “Is there no mercy in your head for me, bazur?” The words were humble, abject, but the tone was gravid with biting irony.

  “Turn around,” I ordered gruffly. “Now, march, and no tricks, or—ugh!”

  So near my ears I heard its whistling descent, so close to my face I felt its rough, hairy strands brush my nose-tip, something whirled snake-like through the darkness, looped about my neck and jerked sharply back, squeezing the life-breath from my throat, forcing my tongue and eyes forward with the sudden ferocity of its strangling grip. The throttling knot drew tight and tighter round my trachea; bone-hard, merciless knuckles kneaded swiftly, savagely at my spine where it joined the skull, seeking to break my neck. I tried to cry for help, but nothing but a stifled gurgle sounded from my swelling lips. Burned out, the match fell from my numbing fingers, and darkness blotted out the sneering face in front of me. Tiny sparks danced and flashed before my eyes; a roaring like the down-pour of a dozen Niagaras pounded in my ears. “This is how poor Orloff died!” I thought, fighting vainly to escape the strangling coil about my neck.

  A sudden shaft of sharp, white light stabbed through the darkness, illuminating the Hindoo’s face before me for a fleeting moment. In the flash I saw the grinning mouth square open like an old Greek horror-mask, saw the swift shadow of a slim, white hand—and something else!—pass like a darting ray of light across the dusky throat an inch or so below the chin, saw the welling spate of blood which gushed across the writhing tongue and gleaming teeth. Then came a horrid, choking gurgle, as of something drowning, and the light blinked out. But:

  “Spawn of the sewer—species of a stinking camel—take that to hell, and say I gave it to you!” de Grandin’s whisper sounded in my ear, and the strangling-cord loosed its biting grip as the man behind me gave a grunt of surprised pain and fell forward, almost oversetting me.

  I turned about, clutching at the wall for support, and beheld my late assailant rolling on the floor, mouthing and slobbering horribly as be hugged both hands to his abdomen. “Ai-i-i-i!” his scream of mortal agony no thicker than the squeaking of a frightened mouse, and even that died in an anguished wheeze. From crotch to sternum he was slit as cleanly as a butcher slits a slaughtered hog for gutting.

  I leaned against the wall, weak with retching nausea at the spectacle de Grandin’s pocket torch disclosed.

  “It is a good cut, that,” the little Frenchman announced softly as he tiptoed across the hall, fumbled a moment and switched on the electric light. “Me, I rather favor it for autopsy work, although the general preference is for the vertical incision beginning at the—”

  “Oh—don’t!” I pleaded, near to swooning at the sight the lighted hall-lamp brought to view. Face downward on the floor lay the fellow I had apprehended, the ever-widening pool of blood which soaked into the carpet telling of his severed throat. Only the tremulous, spasmodic twitching of his clawing fingers told me that he still retained some little spark of life. Hunched on
one shoulder, the cord with which he sought to strangle me still gripped in his hand, lay the other Hindoo, blood gushing from the foot-long incision which ran vertically up his abdomen. Jules de Grandin stood at ease, regarding his handiwork with every evidence of scientific satisfaction, a long, curved-bladed kurkri knife, whetted to a razor-edge, dangling by a thong from his right hand.

  “Eh bien, mon vieux, you look as triste as hell upon a rainy Sunday afternoon!” he told me. “Is it that you have never seen the cover stripped from off the human entrails—you, a medical practitioner, a surgeon, an anatomist? Ah bah, for shame, my friend; you stand there quaking like a student making his first trip to the dissecting-room!”

  “But,” I gasped, still faint with stomach-sickness, “this is too—”

  “Wrong again, my old one,” he corrected with a grin. “Not two, but three. When I left you down below I crept all softly up the stairs until I readied the turn between this story and the one beneath. Ah ha, and what did I see there? What but a sacré son of Mother India going on all fours like a sly-boots up the stairs ahead of me! Oh, very silently he went; so silently he made no sound at all. He had to be seen to be believed, that one!

  “What to do? I had my pistol, and I had my very useful knife, as well. Should I shoot I could not miss him, but what if there were others? The noise would surely put them on their guard, and I desired to surprise them. Accordingly, I chose the knife. I crept a little faster and reached my silent friend before he guessed that I was there at all. Then, very gently, I inserted my knife-tip between his second and third cervical vertebrae. Voilà. He died with exemplary expedition and with no unnecessary noise. ‘Very good,’ I tell me. ‘So far, so perfect.’

  “Then, still silently, I continued on my upward way. I came into the hall, and what did I behold? I ask to know. You, cordieu, standing at the stairhead, as innocent as any unborn lamb, while, crouched behind an angle of the wall, immediately in front of me, a thief-faced rascal was watching you. But ah—even as I saw this, I saw another thing. A door opened very softly in the hall behind you, a bearded ruffian—the same one we had seen in the theater—peered forth, raised up a little stick of wood and flung it quickly at the light. He broke the bulb, and you were left in darkness!

  “I heard you stumble in the dark, I saw you light a match, and by its light I saw you parley with the miscreant with the knife. Tiens, I also saw the other one advance upon you from the rear, drop his strangling-cord about your throat and begin the pleasant process of choking you to death. ‘This thing has ceased to be a joke,’ I tell me; ‘it are time that Jules de Grandin put a stop to it.’”

  “You saved my life; no doubt of it,” I told him. “I’m very grateful—”

  “Chut, it was a pleasure,” he cut in, looking complacently at the stiffening bodies on the floor before us.

  “Come,” he commanded. “We must find Mademoiselle Hélène. She was not in the room from which the bearded man attacked you, for that door had not been forced, and I particularly warned her to bar her door tonight. These other doors have not been opened, for the two who came before me up the stairs had no chance to get in mischief ere I found them. Therefore, it follows that—ah, que diable?”

  He broke off, pointing to the lower margin of the door beside which we stood. Where the door and sill came together a tiny hole, scarcely large enough to let a man insert his finger, had been gouged, and a little pile of fresh sawdust lay about the hole.

  “Well—” I began, but:

  “Not at all; by no means, it is very dam’ unwell, I suspect!” he interrupted. “One does not surely know, of course, but—”

  He rose and beat upon the panels. “Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle Hélène?” he called softly. “Are you there? Answer, if you are, but on no account get off the bed.”

  “Who is it?” Helen Fisk’s voice responded. “Doctor de Grandin? Is anything wrong?”

  “We hope not, but we fear the worst,” he answered. “Stay where you are, for your life, Mademoiselle, and do not be alarmed when we break in the door—”

  “I’ll let you in,” the girl replied, and we heard a rustling of the bed-linen. And:

  “No! Pour l’amour de Dieu, do not set foot to floor, I beg!” he shouted. “We come!”

  Retreating to the far side of the hall he charged full-tilt against the bedroom door, driving his shoulder against the white-enameled panels, bursting the flimsy lock and half running, half stumbling into the pitch-dark room.

  “Stand back, Friend Trowbridge—remain upon your bed, Mademoiselle!” he warned, pausing at the threshold and darting his flashlight quickly about the apartment. “Death lies in wait upon the floor, and—ah? So!”

  Like a pouncing cat he leaped across the cheap rag rug with which the room was carpeted, his searchlight playing steadily upon a tiny, cord-like black coil beneath a chintz-upholstered chair. With a slanting, chopping motion he brought his big, curved knife-blade down once, twice, and yet again, dividing the tiny snake into half a dozen fragments with the slicing blows. “Ha, little brother to the Devil, you are quick, but I am quicker; you are venomous, but so am I, pardieu!” he cried. “Go back to hell, from whence you came, and tell those other snakes I sent you there to keep them company—they, too, have felt this knife tonight!”

  “What is it?” cried Miss Fisk and I in chorus.

  He danced across the room, turned on the light; then, with the air of a gallant assisting a fine lady from her coach, put out his hand and helped the girl down from the bed.

  “Do not approach too near, my beautiful,” he warned. “Those tiny, tender feet of yours might take a wound from him, dead though he be.”

  “What is it?” Straight and slim as a boy in her close-cropped hair and Shantung silk pajamas, Helen Fisk looked with more curiosity than fear at the dismembered little serpent underneath the chair.

  “A krait, parbleu,” he answered. “Bungarus coerulens, the zoölogists call him, and he is not a customer to trifle with, by any means. Nor, cordieu, had you stepped from off your bed and had he sunk those little, so small fangs into your foot or ankle, ‘Dirige, Domine in conspectu tuo viam meum’ the good priests would have sung for you, ma chère, for death follows his bite in from six to eight minutes. Little cousin to the cobra that he is, his bite is far more deadly than that of his disreputable big kinsman.”

  “Gawd, you took a chance with it!” the girl exclaimed admiringly.

  “Not very much,” he admitted, stroking his mustache complacently. “He can strike only his own length, and my knife was a good two inches longer than his body.”

  “But how’d he come to get in my room?” she asked, bewildered. “D’ye s’pose there’s any more of ’em here?”

  “No to your second question, Mademoiselle—through a hole bored in your door to your first,” he answered, smiling. “Those sons of sin cut a little, so small opening in the door, sent their silent messenger of death into your room, and were about to decamp when—we detained them, Friend Trowbridge and I.” To me he added:

  “That accounts for that fellow’s knife, mon ami; it was with that he bored the hole in Mademoiselle Hélène’s door, and he was doubtless about to take departure when your step upon the stair arrested him and he remained to assist his partner of the strangling-cord in finishing you, if help were needed.”

  “What’s that?” the girl demanded. “You mean the guy who almost killed me at the theater was here, and attacked Doctor Trowbridge?”

  “Was here is correct, Mademoiselle.”

  “Where’s he at now?”

  “Eh bien, who can say? I do not think the life he led was very good; his chances of salvation, I should say, were of the slimmest.”

  “You—you mean you kilt him?”

  “Perfectly, Mademoiselle. Both him and his two assistants.”

  “Gee, but you’re wonderful!” Before we realized what she was about, Helen Fisk had laid a hand upon each of his cheeks, drawn his face close to hers and kissed him on the mouth.
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  “Pardieu, my lovely one,” de Grandin chuckled, “you do greatly tempt me to make murder my vocation. For a reward such as that—”

  The thumping thunder of heavy boots upon the stairs cut short his speech.

  “Doctor de Grandin; Doctor de Grandin, are ye there, sor?” demanded Sergeant Jeremiah Costello as, one of the policemen in his wake, he dashed headlong up the stairs.

  “Yes, morbleu, here am I,” de Grandin answered tartly, “and never was I less entranced at sight of your so ugly tête de roux, thou breaker-up of romance! What is it now?”

  “Someone’s been givin’ us th’ runaround,” the sergeant panted. “Some son-of-a-gun—howly Mither, are they dead, sor?” he broke off as he saw the corpses on the floor.

  “Like a herring,” de Grandin returned nonchalantly. “You were saying—?”

  “Well, sor, it looks like some one stood us up. When we seen that there now flash o’ light an’ heard th’ shots a-poppin’, we made sure it wuz a gang war broke out agin; so down to th’ corner we hotfooted it, like three dam’ fools, an’ what d’ye think we found?”

  The little Frenchman grinned, a thought maliciously. “Pétards—how do you call him?—firecrackers?” he replied.

  “Good Lord, how’d ye guess it, sor?”

  “Ah hah, the trick is ancient, mon vieux; so old and threadbare that even you should be immune to it. However, it worked, and if I and Doctor Trowbridge had not been on hand to circumvent their wickedness our poor young lady here would now have been a lovely corpse, and, what is more, I should have missed an evening’s pleasure. As it is—”

  “What’s goin’ on here, I’d like to know?” an irate landlady, mountainous in righteous wrath and a canton flannel nightrobe, mounted the third-floor stairs. “What’s th’ meanin’ o’ this breakin’ in a decent woman’s house at midnight, an’—”

  “Arrah, woman, hold your whist!” Costello interrupted. “’Tis meself an’ Doctor de Grandin an’ Doctor Trowbridge yonder as kilt them three murtherin’ haythins that come into yer place to stab ye all whilst ye wuz sleepin’—an! ye’ve got th’ brassbound nerve to ask us what we’re doin’ here!”