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

by Edouard Jourdan

  I was with him that day, and I asked him for some information about this Danvers, that hardened criminal whose execution seemed to have been only a small incident of work during a career that she did not know. had not interrupted ... But my question was not favored by an ample answer. Sicot, who was cogitation-hearted, made me understand that Danvers had paid, on the scaffold, crimes of a disgusting singularity, remarkable for its brutality. Danvers was also known for his "satanic" leanings, a certain taste for the occult operetta and his frequent visions at the "Cabaret of Heaven and Hell", towards Pigalle.

  Either because he was absorbed by reflections on the imprints, or because the story of Danvers seemed to him totally negligible, I realized that any insistence on my part would have annoyed him. So I let him meditate, his mustache to his teeth, in front of the photograph (face and profile) of the man he had pursued, convicted of murder and led to the torture.

  According to his photograph, Danvers made me look like a very boy. He wore all the marks of mediocrity. It was necessary that the Danvers affair should have been very vulgar, since, despite my work as a special journalist, I scarcely remembered it. The sheet tells me only its size (1 m 76), its proportions, its age (33 years), its profession (watchmaker) and other distinctive without more consequence.

  This is all I can say about the investigation of the double crime of the rue d'Assas.

  For three weeks she laboriously advanced, bringing no discovery; and if, indeed, it was to advance, it was, in the minds of the judges and the policeman, in the form of inductive and deductive reasoning. But to consider the faces of these gentlemen and the bad humor which was portrayed under the expression of an affected indifference, I had the idea more and more clearly that they saw only fire, and that the Bansberg-de-Varmand affair would soon be closed. Inspector Sicot lent himself without pleasure to my interviews. Mr. Dupin, discontent himself, dreamed of a Breton beach towards which the return of a colleague was belatedly allowing him to flee ...

  With a mysterious attraction, I definitively gave up my holidays, and I frequented the Bansbergs as much as discretion permitted.

  They still lived on the Boulevard Montparnasse, because they did not want to occupy the mansion in the Rue d'Assas and because they could not find the desired lodging elsewhere. As for resting in the country, it was not necessary to think of it until the instruction was closed. Johan, at all times, was summoned to the Palace to give M. Dupin valuable information on the habits of his father and M. de Varmand.

  He was always making his way there, with an understandable nervousness that pinched his nostrils and pulled the folds of his emaciated figure.

  One night, coming out of there and crossing the Place Saint-Michel in the joy he always felt at leaving the Palais de Justice, Johan thought he was guessing that a man was following him.

  He turned around, and indeed saw, behind him, a passer-by, darkly dressed.

  It was raining. Premature cold put autumn in the air. The cloudy sky had made the night earlier than in season.

  The man behind was encased in a raincoat. A cigarette lit a carbuncle in the shadow of his face.

  Johan hastened under his umbrella.

  Rue Danton, the man came closer.

  Johan, "to see," took Serpente Street, which is a hijacked hut.

  We followed him.

  His flesh and bones seemed to him alert. Every cell in his body was waking up. And he felt a great inner drought.

  He continued to walk, aimlessly ...

  But a hand rested on his shoulder, and stopped him.

  We stopped him, that's the word; but the substantive? Stop? Arrest? ...

  - Johan Bansberg, right? asked the man.

  Johan had to be quiet, under pain of moaning; and his knees were fainting.

  10 – THE GHOST

  The man spoke with puzzling ease, the cigarette glued to the lower lip. The incandescence of the tobacco shed red glow in the niche of its hood, and gave a glimpse of a bearded face in which two small black eyes, as cold as jet-buttons, were hovering on either side of a sharp nose.

  - Will Mr. give me ten minutes of hearing? he said in an odiously mocking tone. So be kind enough to follow me. I know, near here, the place dreamed.

  Was it an allusion to the Palais de Justice of Paris? ...

  Johan allowed himself to be driven.

  "To whom do I have the honor?" He asked after a moment.

  - The honour is mine! replied the stranger, bursting into a jubilant laugh. Here we are. Come in, my prince.

  They were in a pretty deserted bar on the rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts. Three customers were playing cards, and two others were chatting, leaning on the counter. Entrenched behind his zinc, the sleepy boss wiped glasses. A spout of gas diffused a limited light on the tables of gray marble, and, to overcome the precocious freshness, a cast iron stove, brought to the cherry red, gave off a furnace heat and hints of asphyxia.

  The man sat Johan beside him, on the oilcloth seat, off the consumers.

  - What are you drinking? he said. Me, it will be white wine. You, you need better than that. A little mixture, that will require you.

  The boss served them indolently.

  Meanwhile, Johan, in distress, looked at his despot anxiously. The latter had thrown off his hood with a head movement, and he appeared wearing an uncomfortable cap, which his red scarf accompanied only too well. His beard was fawn. He kept his hands in his pockets and spat the tip of his cigarette away from him. Then, turned towards his scapegoat, he looked at him with a hilarious and possessing air, his master eye, his cruel and piercing eye.

  Johan was only anxious and back.

  "My dear Monsieur Johan Bansberg," said the stranger in a whisper, "here is the thing:

  "You come, do not you, to make an inheritance? You have just received five million, two of which are easily achievable. Well! you will give me one. - That's all.

  - Pleasure? Johan murmured.

  - I say: the day after tomorrow (because I want to give you time to give your orders to the banker), the day after tomorrow morning, you will bring me the sum of one million francs in thousand tickets. No check, no. A thousand denominations of a thousand francs. Yourself. Do not be sad! It seems to me, however, that I am not demanding! You will live in comfort, with the four million that I leave you!

  - But ... under what ...? trembled poor Johan.

  - Are not you there? You do not have, like that, a little idea of​​this business? … Is. We will refresh your memory.

  "Remember, my dear sir, what Dr. Petiot told you, the day you left his clinic on rue Galilee for the Convalescent House in Paris ..."

  - That's not true ... I do not remember ...

  - What! what! Ways, with me? ... Come on, I'll show you that I know as much as you do. Cinema, cinema, my dear boy! Let's grab the movie, and turn the crank!

  "We are in Paris on the night of December 13 to 14 of last year.

  "Here is Mrs. Bansberg, who brings to Dr. Petiot's clinic his poorly wounded husband. And here is Dr. Petiot passing the poor husband's review. Bad head injury Tomorrow, trepanning. Today, we will do what will be possible for the arms, legs and body.

  "It does, but Petiot is not without concern about some of the consequences of his intervention. Your hands are worrying him. And on this point, as if on purpose, Mrs. Bansberg phones: "Save your hands, doctor, it's the virtuoso Johan Bansberg! "

  "Save your hands! easy to say. Petiot meditates. He who was thinking of cutting them off, he who tries boldly to avoid amputation, he whose only hope was to preserve your pretenses of hands almost useless, here he is perplexed.

  "Right away, he thinks of the human transplant! On your wrists, in the place of your crushed hands, graft two new hands, healthy, cut to a living or to a dead who has just died, or still kept in a jar, bathed in a liquid ... Your genius musical, served by your youth and your will, would draw from these hands the party it could!

  "Yes, but where to find a living who consents to sell his hands? I
t really should be no longer needed; and the desperate do not scream on the roofs their desire to commit suicide! As for cabinets full of limbs in reserve, well-stocked windows where amputees will come to choose replacement hands or feet as mittens or shoes are chosen, this is still in the field of the times to come! ...

  "Petiot then stops at the thought of a dead man, a recent death, a dead man who is dead well ... Where to find that?

  "That's when chance did things right.

  "In breakfast, Dr Petiot reads in the papers that the next day, at dawn, the murderer Danvers will be guillotined. He is neither one nor two, jumps by car, goes to the prison, examines the convict on all the seams, finds him about your age and your height, in good health, the hands not too naughty (c is a watchmaker), and he learns with satisfaction that the family will not claim the body. He claims it for experiments, obtains it, gives all kinds of instructions in all places, and returns home very happy.

  " Things are going well. But drink, then. I'm not thirsty. "

  "The next day, everything happens as the good doctor has planned. The corpse of Danvers arrives at the clinic in a van, hot and almost panting, head here, body of there. While you are being cheated, Petiot hands you away meticulously and adds you to Danvers'. He was careful not to slice the skin with a clean incision, in a bracelet, too regular, but on the contrary to give the cutouts a capricious design whose zigzags merge with the scars of your multiple wounds. Some slashes, artistic, practiced on the back of your new hands, will finish abusing third parties.

  "The exchange is accomplished. Ah! what care, what art and solicitude it took, to carry out such a cure! to make a sold out so prodigious! But the story was told to you by Dr. Petiot himself, and I think it was of little interest to you. It was the day that I told you about when you left the clinic when Petiot told you the story of your hands ...

  " Is it this? Did he not tell you that from now on you would have assassin hands at the end of your arms? ... Answer.

  Johan lowered his head and hid his eyes with his seamed hand.

  "What is this man? He thought. A surgeon's help, who is taking advantage of the secret? "

  "At the moment," said the stranger, "you got angry, sorry. You even wanted Petiot to take away your foreign hands. And then, on his prayers, on his advice, you went off like that, after having made him swear to remain silent, even with regard to your wife!

  But since that day, say: what torture! What obsession, favored by the weakness of your brain, so seriously affected, and by this nervousness that is natural to you! You no longer thought of making your new hands the hands of an artist and an honest man! Have you worked them enough, to make them lose all memory of their former proprietor, to appropriate them and try to shape them in the likeness of your dead hands! Have you enough pampered, trained! What expenses, my dear Monsieur, which served our projects admirably! What harm! What precautions! ... and your gloves! that you buy yourself secretly, because you need them of a bigger size than formerly! These gloves you scratched the number, in solitude, to replace it with the figure of your original size: 7! ... And those odious blonde hairs that, despite the depilatory pasta and the electrification, kept pushing and pushing back on those horrible hands - those murderer hands that had slaughtered so many people! ...

  "You hated them! They lived on you in a personal life. Or rather it is Danvers who, thanks to you, survived, thanks to his hands! ... Entered on your flesh, they were there like grafts on a plant. And you were afraid that this vigorous shoot would invade you, by the propagation of its violent sap! You feared to become a Danvers! They had shed blood, those hands! They still wanted to spread it! You watched them as children who had already given evidence of evil ... But despite your efforts, the children were not doing well, and your hands were leading you to crime - according to you!

  "It must also be said that you were helped; that you were gradually dislocated ... At first these nightmares, at the convalescent home; do you remember?

  - It was you ...? Johan said, startled.

  - These nightmares were really happy phenomena! At night, crack! A light awakened you; and sometimes you attend the assassination of your father by yourself, with the help of a billhook, sometimes at your own execution, all intermingled with various pictures of your artistic impotence and the ruin that would inevitably ensue ... Nightmares! Nightmares externalized! Ah! Ah! Ah! I laugh, sir!

  - They were not nightmares?

  - Do you think, dear! A small hole in the wall, just enough to let the beam of light from a projector ... Trichromatic cinematography, you know? In color, what! It's not yet industrial, and it's expensive; but we did not shrink from any expense, as you can see from those we have made to engage the decent actors, artists who are skillful and not too curious to know the destination of the films they shot.

  - But the screen? There was no screen! No hanging! ...

  - Young man you forget the lessons of your masters and in particular the course of physics, and especially the optics, and especially the dioptric, and in particular the real images. Whoever knows how to use it, a game of curved mirrors and lenses is enough to project into space, as on a solid, any image, motionless or moving. We have made some graceful and surprising applications; I remember, among others, a living dancer who appeared in reduction ... We, we used the cinema. What do you want! There are some who know how to use the cinema, and others of the phonograph ...

  Johan, covered with shame, closed his eyes and muttered quietly:

  - Why tell me your stuff today?

  - Because today, my dear sir, the effect sought is obtained. Because the goal is reached! You will hurt yourself, change color like that all the time! A true chameleon, my word! Yes, right now, I can reveal everything to the police and the world; and I do it, because I want to show you that I am not an impostor; that I do not use machinations whose existence I would have surprised, and that I do not come to harvest what others have sown. Righteousness above all! Thus, hold, tools and blades marked with a "666", I can tell you where you found them: one in the door of your room in Paris, the day before the first "nightmare"; another in the door of your apartment, rue Lesueur, the third ...

  - Enough! enough! … I believe you!

  - Unfortunately, rue Lesueur, the "nightmares" were no longer possible ... So, we multiplied these nice little tickets that you found all over the place, even on your conductor's desk, and that gave you access to terror if successful! Ah! ah! Sir, your hands wanted to kill, your fingers wanted blood, your ten fingers, every ten! The Ten want blood. Obey. What poor Mrs. Bansberg looked for what it meant! ...

  - My wife?

  - Ah! continued the stranger without flinching, it was no longer just to follow your treatment and to do exercises, that you locked yourself in the "Hand's Room"! It was no longer just to contemplate the beloved skeleton of your old hands, nor to study with palmistry the lines of your new hands, nor to mark your gloves with the number 7, nor to touch the anatomy of the fingers! It was…

  "It was to read books of criminology, books on Satan and the occult powers, and also, and above all, it was to deepen the history of this Danvers became part of you and whose hands changed your personality, do you believe, like two drops of ink, thrown into a glass of water, tint it all!

  "You had bought all the papers of the 14th and 15th of December, the day and the day of the ordeal at Danvers. They told of his life, his crimes, his death. And in isolation, you feed off this reading! The mutilations of which Danvers signed his murders, made you learn the gesture of the blood ... You thought to recognize, in some of your gestures, old habits kept by your hands ... And, one day, you wanted to control if they knew still to throw knives in the gates, as they did for play, in Danvers' time, according to the newspapers ...

  "And they knew! They remembered! That's what is best! They did not know how to play the piano, but they knew how to cheat?

  "This time, you felt that you were lost. Because your hands dominated you. What was there evil in them had won yo
ur soul by going up by the arms. Is it true? Come, dear sir, must we still remember the scarlet banner and all that pertains to it? It was not bad, for a start! ...

  Johan's confusion was painful to see. He said hurriedly, as if to escape the suffering of a threatening indictment:

  "So, you followed me step by step, whom I never saw? So, you were everywhere? ...

  - Your maid, Regina Delrio, is my friend. You owe him all the tickets found at your house and the blades of the Boulevard Montparnasse. I owe him all the information she drew from her excavations, the cleverly opened letters and confidences of your wife. Ms. Bansberg, she owes him the portrait of "Demonoplasm" in the context of Mum Monet ...

  Huh? What portrait? ...

  - You will ask that to Mrs. Bansberg. You have to make some surprises! ... But see, I know your life better than yourself! Is it not that I have led your perdition?