Devil's Score: A Tale of decadent omen….

by Edouard Jourdan

  "Mr. Edgar Bansberg, too, was murdered by a dead man!

  Each man manifested, according to his character, the immense astonishment he felt. Valentine and his wife opened their mouths like dry fountains; Johan, who had made the effort to get up, looked at us with a mad eye; but M. Massu showed a tempered bewilderment of humor and reserve.

  - Danvers? I said to Valentine. Did Edgar Bansberg pronounce this name sometimes?

  - Never! replied Charlotte, dazed.

  Sicot explained.

  - This is one of the dead he will have mentioned! Like M. de Varmand. There is in the other world a cabal, a secret society of criminals who continue their crimes beyond the guillotine! ...

  On this he began to sneer and suddenly offered us a face that was said to be unveiled with a veil of mourning.

  - No, but all the same! he exclaimed almost happily. You will not believe me stupid at this point! Come on, come on, this is still staging! There is a ploy in these prints! There is medium under this medium! ... Pass me the rubber hand ...

  He blew again into the latex glove.

  "Nothing," he said. And yet common sense requires the use of rubber gloves or fingertips, molded from Danvers fingerprints! There is no way out of there. Or is it that there is more common sense and that lunatics are reasonable ... A molding! I will not stop.

  "But," said I, "are you so sure that the fingerprints of the knife are those of Danvers's fingers?

  - My head to cut, sir! I do not answer you for my judgment, it would be vain and presumptuous; but for the memory, I'm a little there! My skull is an anthropometric box! And you know that bertillonnage is infallible. A fingerprint belongs to only one individual. Never a lookalike in this matter. All different!

  - Where do you conclude ...?

  - This: that the two crimes committed in this house are related; that the same imagination, fertile in artifices, has adroitly disguised them, and that a medium has conceived the plan, if he has not executed it.

  - For what purpose?

  - We will see. Fly, maybe. M. de Varmand was poor; but Mr. Edgar Bansberg passed for being a millionaire. Where is the safe?

  - Right here.

  Charlotte pointed to the study, next to the drawing-room, and asked in a loud voice where the keys were, guessing that they were in the dead man's pocket.

  They were there.

  "It proves nothing," said Sicot; we were able to put them back after flying.

  The other pockets, searched at the same time, provided us with some objects, such as a watch, a handkerchief, a pencil, plus a telegram, dated from the day, received in the morning, bearing these words alone:

  Evoke tonight the spirit of the assassin Danvers.

  Sicot soured.

  - On file! he said without finding anything better to say. Let's see the chest. We passed into the study.

  "Mr. Johan Bansberg," said the inspector, "do you know the secret of the lock?

  - No, excused Johan.

  But Charlotte proudly:

  - I know him! I was the woman of confidence, you know!

  - Open so. Are you familiar with the content?

  - In detail. But the values​​are all in the bank. There are only tickets, a little gold, some papers and family jewels ... There is a list of contents in it.

  - Open. No, wait! First…

  Sicot took his flashlight all around the safe.

  - No break-in ... A little dust on it.

  "If that's right, it's not worth opening it now," said the maid.

  - Indeed ..., agreed the inspector.

  But, hostile to this woman, I pointed out that henceforth Johan was the master of the paternal fortune, and that it seemed to me legal, on the death of Mr. Edgar Bansberg, to open this chest in his presence.

  We went to my observation. Sicot added that the papers might teach him something.

  The chest was found to contain exactly what the notebook listed. We emptied it, and before leafing through the paperwork, Sicot made sure, by means of his little lamp, that there was nothing left.

  I remember very well the blasphemy he uttered in the meantime and that it would be obscene to write here

  We surrounded him.

  Illuminating a black trunk, the inspector showed us fingerprints on a strip of dust.

  - The imprint! he yelled. The imprint of Danvers!

  Charlotte made a Catholic sign of the cross in haste.

  - But nothing is missing ... I noticed from the depths of my stupidity. What would we have come to do? Nothing is missing! ...

  "If nothing has been carried away," said Sicot, "we have brought something! Johan says to him:

  - The sums are right; and for jewelry, the account is there. Not too much, not too much.

  - The papers, then!

  Sicot sat down, and eagerly seized the first file, labeled “Mortgages”

  But the first piece of the first file was a freshly horned business card, which reads in scarlet:

  THE SCARLET BANNER

  And the brave Sicot, hammering his massive forehead with his fist, exclaimed, even more lamentable than before:

  - The writing of Danvers! The writing of Danvers! ... That, gentlemen, pass me the expression, it's diabolical and infernal!

  9 – DARKNESS

  As it was a rational way to think, M. Dupin, already in charge of the Varmand affair, was appointed to instruct the Edgar Bansberg affair simultaneously; and the same prosecutor, Mr. Lambert, scrutinized the two crimes.

  It must be known that the mediums who sat at the house of Mr. Edgar Bansberg on the night of his death, presented themselves to the police the next morning, on their own initiative.

  "There are honest mediums," said Sicot, "and these are not all neuropaths. "

  On my faith! were they not of this number, the three witnesses who recounted the drama with so much emotion and simplicity? ...

  "It depends on what you mean by" honesty, "replied the inspector, when, in the middle of an interrogation, I told him of my impression. Observe carefully ...

  I observed; and I thought, indeed, to discern some difference between the frankness of the mediums to tell the murder and the indignation with which they defended themselves for having used the accessories contained in the seats.

  But the tone changed when they came, one or the other, to say how Mr. Edgar Bansberg had been beheaded in the darkness by a phosphorescent hand suddenly appeared before him, at the moment we were talking about the ghost of Danvers. There was more sincerity there.

  The three stories matched. Thérèse Panard, perhaps, proved more precise than Smith and Antonini; but the florist, the old juggler, and the cartonnier did not contradict each other in any respect.

  "Frightened by a phenomenon that so far exceeded the ordinary limits of occultism, panic had seized them, and, devoid of any illusions about the feelings that an uninformed police feeds about their profession, they had fled. They regretted it, as proved by their voluntary appearance before the police. "

  The interrogation was on going.

  Mr. Edgar Bansberg himself had introduced his guests into the salon, where no one was.

  It had been dark at the beginning of the session.

  Danvers was the sixth assassin dragged by Mr. Edgar Bansberg to his court during this mystical trial against the souls of the famous murderers.

  o the question: "Could anyone be hidden in a piece of furniture? The mediums replied that they did not know. But Sicot says:

  - The culprit entered by the door, after having interrupted the electric current, the door of cloth prevented to see the day; besides, it was already dark in the vestibule. As for the noise of the door, a car passing on the pavement will have smothered it. The man, then, sank behind Mr. Bansberg's chair. There, having rubbed his hand and his bill with a stick of phosphorus, he waited for the evocation of Danvers.

  - And footprints? recalled M. Dupin, turning his index finger with a revolver, which he pointed at his nose in the direction of the inspector. A glov
e?

  - Naturally.

  This word "naturally" defined in five syllables the policeman's method. Sicot immediately rejected anything that he thought was unnatural. I only doubted that his culture was wide enough to allow him, without misclassification, to divide the world of hypotheses into natural and unnatural ones.

  The mediums shook their head. If they were sincere, nothing, in their opinion, was truer than what the inspector thought was wrong - and they were three to one!

  After these, other mediums, familiar with the small mansion, in turn deposed without result.

  Johan had repeated to M. Dupin what he knew. Thanks to Katarina who indoctrinated her, her testimony was truthful. So violent indeed had been his emotion, that one cannot know what he would have told the judge if his wife, aware of her condition, had not given herself the task of strengthening it without seeming to to prove to him that his father was dead regardless of his will. It suffices, moreover, for her to rely on the details of the crime so that Johan might escape the grip of obsession and recognize the vanity of his trances.

  He only says:

  - I was wrong to talk about the concierge to Mr. Sicot. She certainly saw that I was anxious when I went out, and if we questioned him ...

  - But we will not question him! Katarina said.

  Certainly, she was quite quiet about the innocence - the absolute innocence - of Johan in this matter. But she was very embarrassed to talk to him openly. For he still ignored the adventure of stolen jewels, replaced by the map of the scarlet banner, then mysteriously restored, accompanied by another similar card. He also ignored the apparitions of "Demonoplasm". On the other hand, it was by surprise that Katarina had discovered the existence of tools and blades marked with the infamous "666"; and he disliked confessing his little secret search of the "Hand's Room." Finally, she intended not to upset her husband by allusions to this secret that he had asked her to respect.

  So much secretiveness filled him with constant discomfort. She cursed the destiny that forced her, she so frank, to hypocrisy. And she was feverishly searching for the relation between these costumed crimes and all those romantic phenomena which for several months had been illustrating her life.

  What is the relationship between Sir Melchior and "Demonoplasm"? Between "Demonoplasm" and the massacre of the Marquis by a spectral manikin? What is the connection between these bloody slides, numbered three-and-a-half, to Johan, and the assassination of Mr. Edgar Bansberg, decapitated by a similar tool? What is the relation between the theft of jewels on Rue Lesueur and the no less inexplicable visit of the safe in the rue d'Assas, where nothing was missing? Why Johan's extraordinary extraordinary cerebral disintegration at the Saint Maur disaster - or after his trepanning? How could this amazing dream, this externalized dream of the beginning, have occurred? What had happened in the Metz express? What were this ghost, this mage, this doll, these people in the shadows? The crimes did not explain the signs that had announced them; the new mysteries added to the ancients and did not make them less hermetic.

  Katarina watched over Johan. The march of instruction seemed to satisfy him. But nothing could dispel his hypochondria. When the usurer, knowing that he was inheriting, had hastened to extend the term of the ten thousand francs note, this amiability had found him morose and acrimonious.

  However, in the face of the obvious facts and the high honor of the artist, the suspicions vanished, which his first attitude had engendered.

  This was to focus on the Valentin couple, whose absence seemed questionable. But their alibi was verified. Sicot, who answered for their innocence, went to Bar-le-Duc, checked their stay at the house of Charlotte's sister, and took advantage of his trip to be delivered, at the post office, the original telegram false that had determined the journey of the two servants.

  Presented at the ticket office on the eve of the crime, bound for Paris, this text bore the name of a fancy sender: Dubois. It was written by the machine.

  Sicot had memory, as we know. He drew from his wallet the message received by Mr. Edgar Bansberg on the morning of his death, and comparing the two coins, it was easy to see that the same machine had typed the two telegrams.

  As he had suspected, the invitation to travel and the spirit council came from a single unknown. The same character, with or without accomplices, had caused the departure of Valentin and the evocation of the soul of Danvers.

  Having collected in passing this graphic index, which for the moment had only a confirmatory value, the inspector returned to Paris, and finished by giving the Valentin the whiteness which was due to them. Moreover, Mr. Edgar Bansberg had left no provision in their favor; his death deprived them of a true father, and they could not be accused any longer of having decided the life of which they lived.

  Sicot, in concert with M. Dupin, neglected all the tracks which deviated from the mediumnic region. "They were the mediums", or "it was a medium". They did not hinder either one; and the inspector was actively seeking all those who, near or far, formerly or formerly, had been collaborators of the spirits of the Rue d'Assas.

  "You see," he said to me one day, "the assassin has so well made up his assassination, that he has betrayed by that very fact the profession he exercises. It's too well done, and especially it's too fantastic. The supreme address would have been to give us the change by bluffing in another order of ideas, with other expedients, and, being skilful by profession, to simulate clumsiness ...

  "But," I replied, "admit for a moment that the culprit is not a medium and that your reasoning is the same; in this case, his trick would have been to disguise his crimes as crimes of medium, in order to embark on a false direction ...

  - No! The psychology of the murderer demonstrates a medium. To know so completely the things of occultism proves that he is an occultist. There is no way out of it, dare I say. It's clear and clear. The guy is a technician, but his technique and his cunning lose him!

  I bowed.

  "I was talking about psychology," said Sicot. Well! it is a fault of psychology that our man has committed by choosing the disguises of his crimes in the wardrobe of his profession, however rich it may be. We do not think about everything.

  - However, psychics - and here I mean rogue mediums - are, by definition, first-rate psychologists, are not they?

  - They play their patrons like Mr. Johan Bansberg played the piano! But there is piano and piano; I mean: brains and brains. Do not confuse the brain of a Robert the Devil with that of a Sicot. The first only asks to be fooled, the second only seeks to surprise. Be a nervous, impressionable temperament, a gullible or whimsical mind, an intelligence eager for new discoveries and brought to the study of esoteric knowledge, - what prey for a medium, if the medium is a rascal! ... Yes, but too easy prey, whose easy capture accustomed the sharp end to inexpensive successes, and prepares it badly for harsher struggles! ... Come on, Mr. Ray, roll this one and roll that one, that's two; it's me who tell you. And you can believe that between a spiritist and a detective there is something like difference! ...

  All that was quite right ... And I must admit that Inspector Sicot brought in his actions as much logic as in his speeches.

  He dissected, so to speak, the whole building of the Rue d'Assas, from the cellar to the attic, without discovering anything - at least what he published. No trace, point of flight, point of break-in, point of definite importance; in short, as he said: nothing. Only a reconstituted list of mediums seemed to him of any interest.

  For the sake of his conscience, he had made a point of confronting the crime weapon with the Danvers fact sheet. So, from the depths of the archives of the anthropometric service, this document, classified in the category of "Deceased", was exhumed and Sicot was able to verify that the prints of the knife and those of the card were tremendously identical. The same fingers had printed them, here on the wood of the handle, there on the cardboard marked with ink.