“But who the devil operated it?” Chenevert demanded. “Of course, the butler might have been back here when Hilliston was killed, but they bumped him off, too; so—”
“You are positively sure of that?” de Grandin interrupted.
“Well, nothing’s sure but death and taxes, but when we heard him yell, then found this place all smeared with blood—”
“The liquid which you found upon the floor, by example?”
“Yeah, sure; what else?”
“Oh, I thought perhaps you might have found some blood,” the little Frenchman answered with an elfin grin. “Last night I took precaution to soak some of that liquid into a piece of paper. Today I analyzed him. He is an exceptionally fine specimen of—red ink, mon Capitaine.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
“One hopes sincerely otherwise, though undoubtlessly you would lend a touch of savoir faire to hell, my friend.”
“So that butler guy did it, after all! H’m. Now, how’re we going to put the finger on him? That Ditmas girl—”
“Précisément, mon Capitaine. You have said it.”
“Eh? Said what?”
“The pretty Mademoiselle Ditmas, she shall be our stalking-horse.”
“TIENS, THE THREADS BEGIN to join together in a single cord,” he told us as we drove toward Harrisonville.
“I can’t see it,” I responded. “It seems the most mixed-up hodgepodge I ever heard of. Nothing seems related to anything else, and—”
“You have wrong, my friend,” he contradicted. “The relationship is clear, and growing clearer every minute. “Consider—” he checked the items off upon his fanned-out fingers: “Last month we saw a poor dead girl fished up from the bay. Upon her cheek was burned the picture of a knife. Me, I do not know why this should be, but that picture is not merely the representation of a dagger, it is a dagger of one specific kind. The simplest form of dagger-picture is a cross, two straight lines crossing at right angles. Not this one, though. But no, certainly not. It is the carefully prepared picture of a Tripolitan throwing-knife—which may also be conveniently used as a hand-weapon.
“‘What should such a picture be doing burned on an American young lady’s cheek?’ I want to know. This business smells strongly of the East, even to the manner of her killing. Then zut! through the so thick head of Jules de Grandin comes a thought. I was in the Service of Intelligence in the War, my friends; besides I have done some service for the Sûreté, and I have friends around the world. One of them, serving with our forces in Syria, wrote me but recently of a revival of that sect once called les Assassins—the almost mythical but very potent followers of Hassan ibn Sabbah, who from their fortress at Aleppo had terrorized two continents for near three hundred years. Not like a plague, but rather like an epidemic sickness the chapters of this most abominable sect were springing up, now here, now there, throughout the country near Damascus, even as far as Jerusalem and Bagdad. The French had met them with repressive measures, and, believe me, Frenchmen entertain no silly sentimental notions of conciliating native prejudice where law and order are involved. However, we digress.
“The blood-red dagger, exactly like the one burned on that poor girl’s face, was the official badge of Hassan’s minions in the days of old. ‘Now, can it be—’ I ask me, and even as I ask, along comes Colonel Hilliston; the soldier and explorer, the beau sabreur among the travelers, and providentially, he is back from the Near East. ‘This one, will surely know of what is which,’ I tell me confidently. ‘He will have surely poked beneath the rubbish-heaps of gossip and found the truth. He is a learned man, a fearless man; best of all, he is a curious and most inquisitive man.’
“And so I plague my good Friend Trowbridge till he secures an invitation for us to the colonel’s house, and while we all make merry at a most exquisite meal I bring the subject of the Haunted Mountain of the hashish-eaters up; I ask our host if he, by any happy chance, has scaled it for a look around. And does he tell me that he has? Damn no. He shies away from such talk as a nervous horse goes dancing when a piece of paper blows across the road. Ah, but Jules de Grandin is no simpleton. Not he! He can read the signs in people’s faces as he reads the print upon the page. And what does he see in the face of Colonel Hilliston? What does he see, I ask it?” He paused dramatically; then:
“Fear!” he said.
“Yes, mes amis, most certainly, it was fear I saw shine in his eyes, a fear that might be classified as terror; the terror of the hunted deer when, thinking herself safely hid, she hears the baying of the hounds upon her trail. Yes, certainly.
“Et puis—and then? Meantime my good Friend Trowbridge, with a manner highly unbecoming to his eminent respectability, has become most friendly with a pretty little lady who, if ever woman had it, contains a large-sized portion of the devil in her make-up. But do they talk of moonlight kisses and the scent of twice-crushed rose leaves in a lady’s flowing hair, or tender nothings spoken underneath the twinkling stars? Damn no, they do entirely otherwise. They talk of Colonel Hilliston and of something which he fears, of the iron reinforcements of his doors and windows, of the locks and bars and bolts which make his house secure. Secure against whom—or what? What is the terror which pursues him night and day?
“And then, when all the lights go out, and we are plunged in darkness deeper than the blackness of the devil’s lowest cellar, what does this pretty lady say to Doctor Trowbridge? ‘I’m afraid it got in!’
“And next we see Monsieur le Colonel: wholly headless, lying on the floor of his own house; yet no one knows who struck him down, or how, or why.
“‘Oh, do they not, indeed? We shall inquire as to that,’ I tell me when I am informed of Miss Ditmas’ conversation, and so I make a picture of a dagger. Not any dagger, but the kind of dagger which was burned upon the dead girl’s face. And when I show it to Miss Ditmas and tell her we have found it on the colonel’s body, what does she say? Cordieu, she starts to say it is the Red Knife of Hassan, but she does not finish saying it, for from the ceiling falls the guillotine which almost shears her head away, and thereafter she is speechless as an oyster.
“Tiens, we are gathering up the threads, my friends. This Mademoiselle Ditmas, Colonel Hilliston and the dead girl in the bay, they are three corners of a square.”
“And the fourth?” I asked.
“Is Nejib, Colonel Hilliston’s ex-butler.”
“But he’s an Armenian, a Christian,” Captain Chenevert objected. “Those Assassins you’re telling of are Turks or Arabs, or something like that, aren’t they?”
“Can you distinguish between a Japanese and Filipino?” de Grandin countered.
“Eh?”
“Précisément. They look alike; it would be easy to mistake one for the other. So with the peoples of the nearer East—Turks, Armenians, many of the Arabs, they are so much alike to outward seeming that one might easily pass muster for the other. No, this Nejib-butler, he is no Armenian; neither was the Bogos person who did the colonel’s electrical work; they may not be Turks, I strongly doubt they are, but certainly beyond a doubt they are Assassins. Yes, of course.”
“And you think Miss Ditmas can enlighten us?” I asked.
He raised shoulders, hands and eyebrows in a shrug. “Undoubtlessly she can, but will she?” he replied.
THE EARLY WINTER DUSK was falling as we stopped before the house where Margaret Ditmas lived. “I’m not sure Miss Ditmas is in,” said the attendant at the switchboard; “I’ll ring her apartment—”
“Excuse me, you will do nothing of the kind,” de Grandin interrupted. “Ringing telephones and sending in cards are only temptations to weak-souled ones to lie. We shall go ourselves to see if she is in, and—do not ring that telephone.”
“You heard him, feller,” Captain Chenevert added. “If anybody tips Miss Ditmas off we’re on our way to see her, you’re going to know what the inside of a nice, home-like jail looks like, and I don’t mean maybe. See?”
Apparently the ope
rator saw, for it was with an expression of surprise that the trim colored maid met us at the door of the apartment and ushered us in.
Miss Ditmas leant back in a wing chair, a gown of clinging gray swathing her lissome form from throat to insteps. A string of pearls hung round her neck, pearl studs were in her ears, a great pearl solitaire gleamed on the third finger of her right hand, upon her feet were sandals clasped about her ankles with pearl catches, and the little thread of platinum encircling her left ankle shone glimmeringly in the candlelight against her bare, pale-ivory skin. She lay back in the chair like one who slept, or rested after illness, and from the long, thin cigarette which dropped from her right hand a twisting trail of smoke went up, and as I caught its scent I thought of her quotation of the night before: “Ambergris—for passion.”
She turned her head listlessly as we appeared, her clear white profile and night-black hair standing out in charming silhouette against the elfin candlelight, and a faint, wan smile stole across her face like the smile of one who sleeps and dreams a sweetly melancholy dream.
“No, Doctor de Grandin, I haven’t the faintest idea what it was that Colonel Hilliston feared,” she replied in a low, sleepy voice. “Yes, I’d noticed how he’d reinforced his doors and windows, but the house stands in a lonely location, and he had many beautiful and expensive things in his collection. I suppose he wanted to make sure the place wouldn’t be burglarized; don’t you?”
Once more she smiled that slow, disinterested smile, and inhaled deeply from her amber-scented cigarette.
“I really don’t know what I meant by what I said to Doctor Trowbridge when the lights went out,” she answered his next query. “What does anybody mean by such hysterical statements? I was startled, terrified, when we were plunged in sudden darkness, and—do you know, I believe I’d taken too much wine at dinner! How I came to say anything about something getting in is more than I can imagine. Nothing got in really, did it? Unless it were the person who made off with poor Nejib just after my escape from that dreadful thing which dropped out of the ceiling?”
“Mademoiselle,” de Grandin told her sternly, “this is not a salle d’armes.”
“Really, Doctor, I don’t quite understand.”
“Very well, let us be frank as friends are frank. This is no place for fencing. We are come to ask you certain questions, it is true; but we have also come to warn you and protect you.”
“Warn? Protect me? Whatever from?”
“From the Brethren of the Knife, Mademoiselle; from the wielders of the Scarlet Knife of Hassan!”
Her face went blank, then gray-white as a corpse’s countenance, as he shot out the bald statement, but she took a sudden grip upon herself, and:
“I haven’t the remotest idea what you’re talking about,” she told him.
“Au ’voir, Mademoiselle, even le bon Dieu is powerless to help those who will not help themselves,” he answered tonelessly, and made her one of his stiff, Continental bows, that straight-backed bow which always suggested uniform and corset to me.
“Come, my friends, we have important duties to perform,” he told Chenevert and me as he led us from the room.
“NOW WHERE?” THE CAPTAIN asked as we waited for the automatic elevator.
“Upstairs,” the Frenchman answered. “The flat above is vacant.”
“What the devil—”
“Tiens, not the devil in his proper person, perhaps, but certainly his myrmidons,” replied de Grandin with a grin. “Come hurry; we waste our precious time in argument.”
Arrived one story up, he tried the handle of the entrance to the suite directly above Miss Ditmas’, found it locked and as matter-of-factly as though setting a broken arm, set to picking the lock with scientific neatness and dispatch.
“Softly, if you please,” he cautioned as we entered the vacant rooms; “I would not have our footsteps heard below.”
Tiptoeing to the window, he inspected the fire escape which zigzagged down the building’s side, nodded with a smile of satisfaction and turned again to us. “In half an hour they should come,” he whispered. “Do you compose yourselves to wait, my friends; smoke, if you like, but do not speak above a whisper, and keep back from the window. We do not know where they may lurk or how thoroughly they may be watching.”
The minutes dragged away and I was getting stiff from sitting on the floor with my back against the un-upholstered wall when: “P-s-st!” de Grandin’s sharp, admonitory hiss attracted my attention.
“La fenêtre—the window; look!” he ordered softly.
I looked up just in time to see a shadow, but a faint shade darker than the outside gloom, go floating downward past the casement, and half rose with an exclamation when his warning, upraised finger and another hiss arrested me. One, two, three times the window was blocked out by downward-drifting shadows, then de Grandin crept across the room, swung the casement back with slow and wary care, thrust his head forth and glanced quickly up and down, then motioned us to follow him.
“What—” Chenevert began; but:
“S-s-sh, great stupid one, be quiet!” the Frenchman warned him sharply. “This is no parade we make; leave the music home.”
Step by cautious step we clambered down the fire escape, de Grandin in the lead, Chenevert and I near treading on his heels.
No sound reached our ears as we came opposite Miss Ditmas’ open window. The room was dark as Erebus.
“Silence!” warned the Frenchman; then, his hand upon his pistol, “Follow me.” He stepped through the open window, sweeping the room with his flashlight.
The place was in disorder, showing signs of recent struggle, but was empty of human life.
“Nom d’un coq!” exclaimed de Grandin sharply. “After them! We must find them, right away, at once; immediately! God grant that we come not too late!”
The door communicating with the hall was locked, and: “Burst it open,” he exclaimed. “We have no time to pick the lock.”
Suiting action to his words, we put our shoulders to the panels. It held us back a moment but at the third rush it gave way, precipitating us into the hall.
“This way!” He hurried down the passage to a glazed door marked “Freight Elevator.” He pressed the button savagely, but the automatic lift failed to respond.
“Ha, par la barbe d’un poisson, undoubtlessly they took her down that ninety-times-damned lift,” he panted as we hastened down the winding stairs. “They have wedged the lower door ajar to shut off our pursuit, for the mechanism will not lift unless all shaft-doors have been closed. But we have nimble legs, parbleu, and follow fast upon their heels!
“Outside, quickly!” he commanded as we reached the bottom floor. “They have secreted her within the basement, I damn think, but they are no fools, those ones. They will have locked the door behind them, and they would murder her while we were breaking through. This way!”
We burst into the outer air, and de Grandin ran fleetly out into the alley.
“Ah! God be thanked!” he exclaimed, pointing to a row of narrow windows set flush with the ground. “There is an entrance from outside. They are small, these windows, but not too small for Jules de Grandin, I damn think.”
Cautiously, treading lightly as a cat, he examined each of the windows in turn. They were grimy, and impossible to see through, clearly, but through the glass of one a light could be dimly seen. Just as he knelt in an attempt to peer through, a voice came thickly from the room inside.
“Oh, God!” a woman moaned despairingly. “Have pity on me, Hassan! I didn’t tell them anything, I wouldn’t—oh!” The exclamation cut her speech in half.
“No, you did not tell them—yet,” the butler answered in a low and oddly hissing voice. “Nor will you tell, my pretty. The brand, the bowstring and the bay await you, even as they did that other who—”
“Oh, no—no! Not that, for pity’s sake!” the tortured girl entreated. “I tell you I had no intention of disclosing anything! The Frenchman and the others came to
call this evening, but I told them nothing—nothing! I swear it; I—”
The crashing of glass and tearing of rotten wood cut short her plea as de Grandin kicked in the window-frame and launched himself through the narrow opening.
“Pardonnez-moi, Mademoiselle, one dislikes to contradict a lady, but you told us much this afternoon,” he interrupted as he landed, cat-like, on his feet.
Chenevert and I were close behind him, and our flashlights, stabbing through the cellar’s light, disclosed a startling tableau. Upon the rug, birth-nude, knelt Margaret Ditmas. Her ankles were bound beneath her, her wrists were tightly lashed together; her face was a picture of utter despair. Two men stood near her, one slowly whipping a long, thin cord-picture-wire!—back and forth before him, the other heating something in a little charcoal brazier such as plumbers used to carry before the days of the gas-torch. But it was the one who stood with folded arms before her that drew and held my gaze as a magnet draws a needle.
The figure was clothed in a long white robe, with a curious head-piece that completely veiled the face except for two large, square eye-holes covered with gauze that hid the eyes behind them. On the front of the robe a dagger was embroidered in vivid red thread—the red knife of the Assassins, of whom Miss Ditmas had told us.
For an instant the tableau held. Then:
“Non, do not move, Messieurs, or—eh bien, since you request it!”
Three knives flashed from their hidden sheaths even as he spoke, but quicker than the knives were Jules de Grandin’s shots. So fast he fired it seemed as if a single line of flame were flashing from the muzzle of his automatic pistol, and the man above the brazier toppled over with his hands clasped to his stomach, while the fellow with the picture-wire hunched his shoulders forward as though about to sneeze, emitted a soft hiccup and fell face-downward on the rug, a spate of blood spilling from his gaping mouth.
The masked figure in front of Margaret Ditmas stood unmovable, swaying slightly, like a person seized with vertigo; then, like a tree which woodsmen have sawn through, his swaying motion quickened, and he toppled sideways, crashing down upon the floor, his long, curved knife still grasped within his hand. It was not till later that I learned de Grandin had shot the butler through the brain (for Nejib, the “Armenian,” it was). He must have died upon his feet a full ten seconds before he fell.
A Rival from the Grave Page 21
