“Jolly interestin’,” murmured Pemberton. “What was it he forgot?”
“That you would ask advice of Jules de Grandin!” my little friend grinned shamelessly. “There it was he missed his trick. I am very clever. I looked the situation over and saw we were confronted by both physical and ghostly menaces. For the men we have the sword, the pistol and the fist. For the ghostly enemy we need a subtler weapon.
“Accordingly, when I go to the village to obtain the locks for doors and windows, I also stop to visit with the curé of the little church. Fortunately, he is Irish, and I do not have to waste a day convincing him. ‘Mon père,’ I say, ‘we are confronted with the devil of a situation. A crew of monkey-faces who give worship to the wicked ones of India are menacing a Christian family. They will undoubtlessly attempt to burn them up with fire—not ordinary fire, but fire they make by wicked, sinful, heathen incantations. Now, for ordinary fire we use the ordinary water; what should we use to put out fire that comes from hell, or hell’s assistants?’
“That old priest smiles at me. He is no fool. ‘My son,’ he say, ‘long, long ago the fathers of the Church discovered that it is hot work to fight the devil with fire. Therefore they invent holy water. How much of it will you be needing for your work?’
“He was a good and hospitable man, that priest. He had no whisky in the house, but he had beer. So we made a lunch of beer and cheese and biscuit, and when we finish, we clean a bottle out and fill him to the neck with eau bénite.
“‘Bonjour, mon fils,’ the old priest say, ‘and when you win your fight with Satan’s henchmen, remember that our church could use a new baptismal font.’ You will remember that, I trust, Monsieur, when you get your inheritance?”
“By George, I’ll build a new church for him, if he wants it!” promised Pemberton.
THE LOCOMOTIVE GAVE A long-drawn, mournful wail as the train drew near the station and the smiling porter hurried through the car collecting luggage. “Well, we’re home again,” I remarked as the train slid to a stop.
“Yes, grâce à Dieu, we have escaped,” de Grandin answered piously.
“It did look pretty bad at times,” I nodded. “Especially when that fellow at the window poised his knife, and those devilish flames began to flicker—”
“Ah bah,” he interrupted scornfully. “Those things? Pouf, they were not to be considered! I speak of something far more hideous we have escaped. That dreadful English cooking, that cuisine of the savage. That roast of mutton, that hell-brew they call coffee, that abominable apple tart!
“Come, let us take the fastest cab and hasten home. There a decent drink awaits us, and tonight in hell’s despite I shall complete construction of the perfect bouillabaisse!”
Frozen Beauty
THE HEAT HAD BEEN intolerable all day, but now a rain was falling, a soft and cooling summer rain that spread a gleaming black veneer across the highway pavement and marked the traffic lamps with cross-shaped fuzzy glows of green and ruby. Falling on our faces as we drove home from the club with the roadster’s canvas cover folded back it was cool and gracious, delicate and calm upon our brows as the light touch of a skillful nurse’s fingers on a fever-patient’s forehead, soothing nerves stretched taut by eighteen holes of golf played in a blistering sun.
My friend Jules de Grandin’s satisfaction with himself was most annoying. He had ceased playing at the second hole, found a wicker rocker on the clubhouse porch and devoted the entire afternoon to devastation of gin swizzles.
“Tiens,” he chuckled, “you are droll, my friend, you English and Americans. You work like Turks and Tartars at your professional vocations, then rest by doing manual labor in the sun. Not I, by blue; I have the self-respect!”
He leant back on the cushions, turning up his forehead to the cooling rain and hummed a snatch of tune:
La vie est vaine,
Un peu d’amour—
With a strident screech of brakes I brought the roadster to a stop in time to keep from running down the man who stood before us in the headlights’ glare, arm raised imperatively. “Good heavens, man,” I rasped, “d’ye want to be run over? You almost—”
“You’re a doctor?” he demanded in a sharp, thin voice, pointing to the Medical Society’s green cross and gold caduceus on my radiator.
“Yes, but—”
“Please come at once, sir. It’s the master, Doctor Pavlovitch. I—I think he’s very ill, sir.”
The ethics of the medical profession take no account of work-worn nerves, and with a sigh I headed toward the tall gate in the roadside hedge the fellow pointed out. “What seems to be the matter with the doctor?” I inquired as our guide hopped nimbly on the running-board after swinging back the driveway gate.
“I—I don’t know, sir,” he replied. “Some kind o’ stroke, I think. Th’ telephone went out of order just at dinner-time—lightning musta hit th’ line when th’ storm was blowin’ up—an’ I took th’ station wagon to th’ village for some things th’ grocer hadn’t sent. When I got back everythink was dark an’ couldn’t seem to make th’ lights work, but they flashed on all sudden-like, an there was Doctor Pavlovitch a-layin’ in th’ middle o’ th’ floor, with everythink all messed up in th’ study, an’ I couldn’ seem to rouse him; so I tried to get th’ village on th’ phone, but it still won’t work, and when I tried to start th’ station wagon up I found that somethink had gone wrong with it; so I starts to walk down to th’ village, an’ just then you come down th’ road, an’ I seen th’ little green cross on your car, so—”
“I’ll have that darn thing taken off tomorrow,” I assured myself; then, aloud, to stop the servant’s endless chatter: “All right, we’ll do everything we can, but we haven’t any medicines or instruments; so maybe we shall have to send you for supplies.”
“Yes, sir,” he replied respectfully, and to my relief lapsed into momentary silence.
THE BIG HOUSE DOCTOR Michail Pavlovitch had purchased two years previously and in which he lived in churlish solitude, attended only by his English houseman, sat back on a deep lawn thick-set with huge old trees, fenced against the highway by an eight-foot privet hedge and surrounded on the three remaining sides by tall brick walls topped with broken bottles set in mortar. As we circled up the driveway I could feel the eery atmosphere that hovered round the place. It was, I think, the lights which struck me queerly, or, to be more accurate, the absence of familiar lights in a place we knew to be inhabited. Blinds were drawn down tightly, with forbidding secrecy, at every window; yet between their bottoms and the sills were little lines of luminance which showed against the darkness like a line of gray-white eyeball glimpsed between the lowered eyelids of a corpse.
We hurried down the wide hall to a big room at the rear and paused upon the threshold as the glare of half a dozen strong, unshaded lamps stabbed at our eyes. Everything about the place was topsy-turvy. Drawers had been jerked from desks and literally turned out upon the floor, their contents scattered in fantastic heaps as though they had been stirred with a gigantic spoon. The davenport was pulled apart, its mattress tipped insanely sidewise; pillows were ripped open and gaped like dying things, their gasping mouths disgorging down and kapok. The whole room might have been a movie set at the conclusion of a slapstick farce, except for that which occupied the center of the floor.
In the midst of the fantastic jumble lay a man in dinner clothes, save for the jacket which, sleeves turned half out and linings slit to tatters, was crumpled on a chair. He lay upon his back, his partly opened eyes fixed on the ceiling where a cluster of electric bulbs blazed white and hard as limelight. He was a big man with a big mustache curled in the fashion of the pre-war days, and what hair he had was touched with gray.
“Gawd, sir, he ain’t moved since I left ’im!” the houseman whispered. “Is ’e paralyzed, d’ye think?”
“Completely,” nodded Jules de Grandin. “He is very dead, my friend.”
“Dead?”
“Like a herring, and unles
s I miss my guess, he died of murder.”
“But there’s no blood, no sign of any wound,” I interrupted. “I don’t believe there was a struggle, even. The place has been ransacked, but-”
“No wound, you say, mon vieux?” he broke in as he knelt beside the dead man’s head. “Regardez, s’il vous plaît.” He raised the massive, almost hairless head, and pointed with a well-groomed finger to a gleaming silver stud protruding from the flesh. Plunged in the rather beefy neck a tiny silver-headed bodkin showed. Less than half an inch of haft protruded, for the little awl was driven deep into that fatal spot, the medulla oblongata, with deadly accuracy. Death had been instantaneous and bloodless.
“How—” I began, but he shut me off with an unpleasant laugh as he rose and brushed his knees.
“Cherchez la femme,” he murmured. “This is undoubtlessly a woman’s work, and the work of one who knew him quite well. All the evidence suggests it. A little, tiny bodkin driven into the brain; a woman’s weapon. Probably she did it with her arms about his neck; a woman’s finesse, that. Who she was and why she did it, and what she and her confederates looked for when they made a bears’ den of this place is for the police to determine.”
Turning to the servant he demanded: “This Doctor Pavlovitch, did he have callers in the afternoon?”
“No, sir, not as I knows of. He was a queer ’un, sir, though he was a proper gentleman. Never had no callers I remember, never used th’ telephone while I was here. If anybody ever come to see ’im they done it while I was away.”
“One sees. Did he ever mention fearing anyone, or suspecting that he might be robbed?”
“Him? Lor, sir, no! Six foot three in ’is stockin’s, ’e was, an’ could bend iron bars in ’is bare hands. I seen ’im do it more’n once. Had a regular harsenal o’ guns an’ things, too, ’e did, an’ kept th’ house locked like a jail. Didn’t take no chances on a robbery, sir, but I wouldn’t say he was afraid. He’d ‘a been a nasty customer in a row; if anyone ‘ad broken in he’d ‘a give ’em what-for good an’ proper, sir.”
“U’m?” Going to the telephone the little Frenchman raised the instrument from its forked cradle and held it to his ear. “Parbleu!” he pressed the contact bar down with a triple rattle, then dropped the speaking-tube back in its rack. “Remain here, if you please,” he bade the servant as he motioned me to follow. Outside, he whispered: “There is no dial tone discernible. The line is cut.”
WE CIRCLED ROUND THE house seeking the connection, and beside a chimney found the inlet. The wires had been neatly clipped, and the fresh-cut copper showed as bright against the severed insulation as a wound against dark flesh.
“What d’ye make of it?” I asked as he knelt on the wet grass and searched the ground for traces of the wire-cutters. “Think that chap inside knows more than he pretends?”
“Less, if possible,” he said shortly. “Such stupidity as his could not be simulated. Besides, I know his type. Had he been implicated in a murder or a robbery he would have set as great a distance between him and the crime-scene as he could.” With a shrug of resignation he straightened to his feet and brushed the leaf-mold from his trousers. “No tracks of any sort,” he murmured. “The grass grows close against the house, and the rain has washed away what little tale the miscreants’ footprints might have told. Let us go back. We must inform the police and the coroner.”
“Want me to take the car and notify ’em?” I asked as we turned the corner of the house. “It’s hardly safe to trust the servant out of sight before the officers have had a chance to question him, and you don’t drive, so—”
The pressure of his fingers on my elbow silenced me, and we drew back in the shelter of the ivy-hung wall as the crunch of wheels came to us from the lower driveway.
“What the deuce?” I wondered as I glimpsed the vehicle between the rain-drenched trees. “What’s an express van doing here this time o’ night?”
“Let us make ourselves as inconspicuous as possible,” he cautioned in a whisper. “It may be that they plan a ruse for entering the house, and—”
“But good heavens, man, they’ve already gone through it like termites through a log,” I interjected.
“Ah bah, you overlook the patent possibilities, my friend. What do we really know? Only that Doctor Pavlovitch was murdered and his study ransacked. But why do people search a place? To find something they want, n’est-ce-pas? That much is obvious. Still, we do not know they found the thing they sought, or, if they found it, we cannot say that others do not also seek it. It must have been a thing of value to have caused them to do murder.”
“You mean there may be two gangs hunting something Pavlovitch had hidden in his house?”
“It is quite possible. He was a Russian, and Russia is synonymous with mystery today. The old noblesse have smuggled fortunes from the country, or have plans for getting out the treasures they could not take with them in flights; plots and counterplots, intrigue, plans for assassination or revenge are natural to a Russian as fleas are to a dog. I think it wholly possible that more than one conspiracy to deprive the amiable Pavlovitch of life and fortune has been in progress, and he would not have been a good insurance risk even if the ones who murdered him tonight had done their work less thoroughly.”
The big green truck had drawn up at the steps and a man in express uniform hopped out. “Doctor Pavlovitch?” he asked when the houseman answered to his thunderous banging at the knocker.
“No-o, sir,” gulped the servant, “the doctor isn’t home just now—”
“Okay, pal. Will you sign for this consignment and give us a lift with it? It’s marked urgent.”
With grunts and exclamations of exertion, plus a liberal allowance of the sort of language prized by soldiers, stevedores and sailors, the great packing-case was finally wrestled up the steps and dropped unceremoniously in the hall. The express van turned down the drive, and we slipped from our concealment to find Pavlovitch’s houseman gazing at the giant parcel ruefully.
“What’ll I do with it now, sir?” he asked de Grandin. “I know th’ doctor was expectin’ somethink of th’ sort, for he told me so hisself this mornin’; but ‘e didn’t tell me what it was, an’ I don’t know whether I should open it or leave it for th’ officers.”
De Grandin tweaked an end of waxed mustache between his thumb and forefinger as he regarded the great crate. It was more than six feet long, something more than three feet wide, and better than a yard in height.
“Eh bien,” he answered, “I think the citizens of Troy were faced with the same problem. They forbore to open that which came to them, with most deplorable results. Let us not be guilty of the same mistake. Have you a crowbar handy?”
WHOEVER PUT THAT CASE together had intended it to stand rough usage, for the two-inch planks that formed it were secured with mortises and water-swollen dowels, so though the three of us attacked it furiously it was upward of an hour ere we forced the first board loose; and that proved only the beginning, for so strongly were the shooks attached to one another that our task was more like breaking through a solid log than ripping a joined box apart. Finally the last plank of the lid came off and revealed a packing of thick felt.
“Que diable?” snapped de Grandin as he struck his crowbar on the heavy wadding. “What is this?”
“What did you expect?” I queried as I mopped a handkerchief across my face.
“A man, perhaps a pair of them, by blue!” he answered. “It would have made an ideal hiding-place. Equipped with inside fasteners, it could have been thrown open in the night, permitting those who occupied it to come forth and search the place at leisure.”
“Humph, there’s certainly room for a man or two in there,” I nodded, prodding tentatively at the black felt wadding with my finger, “but how would he get air—I say!”
“What is it?” he demanded. “You have discovered something—”
“Feel this,” I interrupted, “it seems to me it’s—”
“Par
bleu, but you have right!” he exclaimed as he laid his hand against the felt. “It is cool, at least ten degrees cooler than the atmosphere. Let us hasten to unearth the secret of this sacré chest, my friends, but let us also work with caution. It may contain a charge of liquid air.”
“Liquid air?” I echoed as with the heavy shears the servant brought he started cutting at the layers of laminated felt.
“Certainement. Liquid air, my friend. Brought in sudden contact with warm atmosphere it would vaporize so quickly that the force of its expansion would be equal to a dynamite explosion. I have seen it—”
“But that’s fantastic,” I objected. “Who would choose such an elaborate—”
“Who would choose a woman’s bodkin to dispatch the learned Doctor Pavlovitch?” he countered. “it would have been much simpler to have shot him; yet—morbleu, what have we here?”
The final layer of felt had been laid back, and before us gleamed a chest of polished dark red wood, oblong in shape, with slightly rounded top with chamfered edges and a group of Chinese ideographs incised upon it. I had seen a case like that but once before, but I recognized it instantly. A friend of mine had died while traveling in Mongolia, and when they shipped his body home . . . “Why, it’s a Chinese coffin!” I exclaimed.
“Précisément, un cercueil de bois chinois, but what in Satan’s name does it do here? And behold, observe, my friend; it, too, is cold.”
He was correct. The polished puncheon of Mongolian cedar was so cold that I could hardly bear to rest my hand upon it.
“I wonder what those characters stand for?” I mused. “If we could read them they might give some clue—”
“I do not think so,” he replied. “I can make them out; they are the customary hong for Chinese coffins, and mean cheung sang—long life.”
A Rival from the Grave Page 62
