“I do not like it, me,” de Grandin’s comment brought my wandering attention back. “It is both strange and queer; it is not right.”
“Eh?” I returned. “Quite so; I agree with you. It’s shameful for a girl like that to sell—or maybe only rent—herself to such a creature—”
“Non, non,” he interrupted testily. “I have no thought of censoring their morals, such are their own affair. It is their treatment of the food that intrigues me.”
“Food?” I echoed.
“Oui-da, food. On three distinct occasions they have ordered refreshment, yet each time they allowed it to grow cold; let it remain untouched until the garçon carried it away. I ask you, is that right?”
“Why—er—” I temporized, but he hurried on.
“Once as I watched I saw the woman make as though to lift a goblet to her lips, but the gesture of her escort halted her; she set the beverage down untasted. What sort of people ignore wine—the living soul of the grape?”
“Well, are you going to investigate?” I asked, grinning. I knew his curiosity was well-nigh as boundless as his self-esteem, and should not have been too greatly surprised if he had marched to the strange couple’s table and demanded an explanation.
“Investigate?” he echoed thoughtfully. “Um. Perhaps I shall.”
He snapped the pewter lid of his beer-mug back, took a long, pensive draught, then leant forward, small round eyes unwinkingly on mine. “You know what night this is?” he demanded.
“Of course, it’s Halloween. All the little devils will be out stealing garden gates and knocking at front doors—”
“Perhaps the larger devils will be abroad, too.”
“Oh, come, now,” I protested, “you’re surely not serious—”
“By blue, I am,” he affirmed solemnly. “Regardez, s’il vous plaît.” He nodded toward the pair at the adjoining table.
Seated directly opposite the strange couple was a young man occupying a table by himself. He was a good-looking, sleek-haired youngster of the sort to be found by scores on any college campus. Had de Grandin brought the same charge of food wastage against him that he had leveled at the other two he would have been equally justified, for the boy left an elaborate order practically untasted while his infatuated eyes devoured every line of the girl at the next table.
As I turned to look at him I noted from the corner of my eye that the girl’s escort nodded once in the same direction, then rose and left the table abruptly. I noticed as he walked toward the door that his walk was more like the rapid amble of an animal than the step of a man.
The girl half turned as she was left alone and under lowered lashes looked at the young man so indifferently that there was no mistaking her intent.
De Grandin watched with what seemed bleak disinterest as the young man rose to join her, and, save for an occasional covert glance, paid no attention as they exchanged the inane amenities customary in such cases, but when they rose to leave a few minutes later he motioned me to do likewise. “It is of importance that we see which way they go,” he told me earnestly.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, be sensible!” I chided. “Let them flirt if they want to. I’ll warrant she’s in better company now than she came in with—”
“Précisément, exactly, quite so!” he agreed. “It is of that ‘better company’ I think when I have the anxiety.”
“H’m, that was a tough-looking customer she was with,” I conceded. “And for all her innocent-looking prettiness she might be the bait in a badger-game—”
“A badger-game? Mais oui, my friend. A game-of-the-badger in which the stakes are infinitely high!” Of the ornate doorman he demanded, “That couple, that young man and woman—they did go what way, Monsieur le Concierge?”
“Huh?”
“The young man and young woman—you saw them depart? We would know their direction—” a crumpled dollar bill changed hands, and the doorman’s memory revived miraculously.
“Oh, them. Yeah, I seen ’em. They went down th’ street that-away in a big black taxi. Little English feller drivin’ ’em. Looked like th’ feller’s made a mash. He’ll get mashed, too, if th’ tough bimbo ’at brought th’ broad in ketches ’im messin’ round with her. That gink’s one awful mean-lookin’ bozo, an’—”
“Assuredly,” de Grandin agreed. “And this Monsieur le Gink of whom you speak, he went which way, if you please?”
“He come outer here like a bat outer hell ’bout ten minutes ago. Funny thing ’bout him, too. He was walkin’ down th’ street, an’ I was watchin’ him, not special, but just lookin’ at him, an’ I looked away for just a minute, an’ when I looked back he was gone. He wasn’t more’n half way down th’ block when I last seen him, but when I looked again he wasn’t there. Dam’ if I see how he managed to get round th’ comer in that time.”
“I think that your perplexity is justified,” de Grandin answered as I brought the car to a stop at the curb, then, to me: “Hasten, Friend Trowbridge. I would that we get them in sight before they are lost in the storm.”
IT WAS A MATTER of only a few minutes to pick up the tail light of the big car in which the truants sped toward the outskirts of town. Occasionally we lost them, only to catch them again almost immediately, for their route led straight out Orient Boulevard toward the Old Turnpike. “This is the craziest thing we’ve ever done,” I grumbled. “There isn’t any more chance that we’ll catch them than—great Scott, they’ve stopped!”
Improbably, the big car had drawn up at the imposing Canterbury Gate of Shadow Lawn Cemetery.
De Grandin leant forward in his seat like a jockey in the saddle. “Quick, hurry, make all speed, my friend!” he besought. “We must catch them before they alight!”
Try as I would my efforts were futile. Only an empty limousine and a profanely bewildered chauffeur awaited us when we drew up at the burying ground, our engine puffing like a winded horse.
“Which way, my friend—where did they go?” de Grandin vaulted from the car before we had come to a full stop.
“Inside th’ graveyard!” answered the driver. “What th’ hell d’ye know about that? Bringin’ me way out here where th’ devil says ‘Good Night!’ an’ leavin’ me as flat as a dam’ pancake.” His voice took on a shrill falsetto in imitation of a woman’s. “‘You needn’t wait for us, driver, we’ll not be com’ back,’ she says. Good God A’ mighty, who th’ hell but dead corpses goes into th’ cemet’ry an’ don’t come back?”
“Who, indeed?” the Frenchman echoed, then, to me: “Come, Friend Trowbridge, we must hasten, we must find them all soon, or it is too late!”
SOLEMN AS THE PURPOSE to which it was dedicated, the burial park stretched dark and forbidding about us as we stepped through the grille in the imposing stone gateway. The curving ravelled avenues, bordered with double rows of hemlocks, stretched away like labyrinthine mazes, and the black turf with its occasional corrugations of mounded graves or decorations of pallid marble, sloped upward from us, seemingly to infinity.
Like a terrier on the scent de Grandin hurried forward, bending now and then to pass beneath the downward-swaying bough of some rain-laden evergreen, then hurrying still faster.
“You know this place, Friend Trowbridge?” he demanded during one of his brief halts.
“Better than I want to,” I admitted. “I’ve been here to several funerals.”
“Good!” he returned. “You can tell me then where is the—how do you call him?—the receiving vault?”
“Over there, almost in the center of the park,” I answered, and he nodded understandingly, then took up his course, almost at a run.
Finally we reached the squat grey-stone receiving mausoleum, and he tried one of the heavy doors after another. “A loss!” he announced disappointedly as each of the tomb’s great metal doors defied his efforts. “It seems we must search elsewhere.”
He trotted to the open space reserved for parking funeral vehicles and cast a quick appraising look about, a
rrived at a decision and started like a cross-country runner down the winding road that led to a long row of family mausoleums. At each he stopped, trying the strong metal gratings at its entrance, peering into its gloomy interior with the aid of his pocket flashlight.
Tomb after tomb we visited, till both my breath and patience were exhausted. “What’s all this nonsense?” I demanded. “What’re you looking for—”
“That which I fear to find,” he panted, casting the beam of his light about. “If we are balked—ah? Look, my friend, look and tell me what it is you see.”
In the narrow cone of light cast by his small electric torch I descried a dark form draped across the steps of a mausoleum. “Wh-why, it’s a man!” I exclaimed.
“I hope so,” he replied. “It may be we shall find the mere relic of one, but—ah? So. He is still breathing.”
Taking the flashlight from him I played its ray on the still form stretched upon the tomb steps. It was the young man we had seen leave the café with the strange woman. On his forehead was a nasty cut, as though from some blunt instrument swung with terrific force—a blackjack, for instance.
Quickly, skillfully, de Grandin ran his supple, practised hands over the youngster’s body, pressed his fingers to his pulse, bent to listen at his chest. “He lives,” he announced at the end of his inspection, “but his heart, I do not like it. Come; let us take him hence, my friend.”
“AND NOW, mon brave,” he demanded half an hour later when we had revived the unconscious man with smelling salts and cold applications, “perhaps you will be good enough to tell us why you left the haunts of the living to foregather with the dead?”
The patient made a feeble effort to rise from the examination table, gave it up as too difficult and sank back. “I thought I was dead,” he confessed.
“U’m?” the Frenchman regarded him narrowly. “You have not yet answered our question, young Monsieur.”
The boy made a second attempt to rise, and an agonized expression spread over his face, his hand shot up to his left breast, and he fell back, half lolling, half writhing on the table.
“Quick, Friend Trowbridge, the amyl nitrite, where is it?” de Grandin asked.
“Over there,” I waved my hand toward the medicine cabinet. “You’ll find some three-minim capsules in the third bottle.”
In a moment he secured the pearly little pellets, crushed one in his handkerchief and applied it to the fainting boy’s nostrils. “Ah, that is better, n’est-ce-pas, my poor one?” he asked.
“Yes, thanks,” the other replied, taking another deep inhalation of the powerful restorative, “much better.” Then, “How’d you know what to give me? I didn’t think—”
“My friend,” the Frenchman interrupted with a smile, “I was practising the treatment of angina pectoris when you were still unthought of. Now, if you are sufficiently restored, you will please tell us why you left the Café Bacchanale, and what occurred thereafter. We wait.”
Slowly, assisted by de Grandin on one side and me on the other, the young man descended from the table and seated himself in an easy chair. “I’m Donald Rochester,” he introduced himself, “and this was to have been my last night on earth.”
“Ah?” Jules de Grandin murmured.
“Six months ago.” the young man continued, “Dr. Simmons told me I had angina pectoris. My case was pretty far advanced when he made his diagnosis, and he gave me only a little while to live. Two weeks ago he told me I’d be lucky to see the month out, and the pain was getting more severe and the attacks more frequent; so today I decided to give myself one last party, then go home and make a quick, clean job of it.”
“Damn!” I muttered. I knew Simmons, a pompous old ass, but a first-rate diagnostician and a good heart man, though absolutely brutal with his patients.
“I ordered the sort of meal they haven’t allowed me in the last half year,” Rochester went on, “and was just about to start enjoying it when—when I saw her come in. Did”—he turned from de Grandin to me as if expecting greater understanding from a fellow countryman—“did you see her, too?” An expression of almost religious rapture overspread his face.
“Perfectly, mon vieux,” de Grandin returned. “We all saw her. Tell us more.”
“I always thought this talk of love at first sight was a lot of tripe, but I’m cured now. I even forgot my farewell meal, couldn’t see or think of anything but her. If I’d had even two more years to live, I thought, nothing could have kept me from hunting her out and asking her to marry—”
“Précisément, assuredly, quite so,” the Frenchman interrupted testily. “We do concede that you were fascinated, Monsieur; but, for the love of twenty thousand pale blue monkeys, I entreat you tell us what you did, not what you thought.”
“I just sat and goggled at her sir. Couldn’t do anything else. When that big brute she was with got up and left and she smiled at me, this poor old heart of mine almost blinked out, I tell you. When she smiled a second time there wasn’t enough chain in the country to keep me from her.
“You’d have thought she’d known me all her life, the way she fell in step when we went out of the café. She had a big black car waiting outside and I climbed right in with her. Before I knew it, I was telling her who I was, how long I had to live, and how my only regret was losing her, just when I’d found her. I—”
“Parbleu, you told her that?”
“I surely did, and a lot more—blurted out that I loved her before I knew what I was about.”
“And she—”
“Gentlemen, I’m not sure whether I ought to have delirium or not with this disease, but I’m pretty sure I’ve had a touch of something. Now, I want you to know I’m not crazy before I tell you the rest; but I might have had a heart attack or something, then fallen asleep and dreamed it.”
“Say on, Monsieur,” de Grandin ordered rather grimly. “We listen.”
“Very well. When I said I loved her that girl just put her hands up to her eyes—like this—as if to wipe away some unshed tears. I half expected she’d be angry, or maybe giggle, but she didn’t. All she said was, ‘Too late—oh, too late!’
“‘I know it is,’ I answered. ‘I’ve already told you I’m as good as dead, but I can’t go west without telling you how I feel.’
“Then she said, ‘Oh, no, it’s not that, my dear. That’s not at all what I meant. For I love you, too, though I’ve no right to say so—I’ve no right to love anyone—it’s too late for me, too.’
“After that I just took her in my arms and held her tight, and she sobbed as if her heart would break. Finally I asked her to make me a promise. ‘I’ll rest better in my grave if I know you’ll never go out with that ugly brute I saw you with tonight,’ I told her, and she let out a little scream and cried harder than ever.
“Then I had the awful thought that maybe she was married to him, and that was what she meant when she said it was too late. So I asked her point blank.
“She said something devilish queer then. She told me, ‘I must go to him whenever he wants me. Though I hate him as you can never understand; when he calls I have to go. This is the first time I’ve ever gone with him, but I must go again, and again, and again! She kept screaming the word till I stopped her mouth with kisses.
“Presently the car stopped and we got out. We were at some sort of park, I think, but I was so engrossed in helping her compose herself I didn’t notice much of anything.
“She led me through a big gate and down a winding road. At last we stopped before some sort of lodge-house, and I took her in my arms for one last kiss.
“I don’t know whether the rest of it really happened or whether I passed out and dreamed it. What I thought happened was this: Instead of putting her lips against mine, she put them around them and seemed to draw the very breath out of my lungs. I could feel myself go faint, like a swimmer caught in the surf and mauled and pounded till the breath’s knocked out of him, and my eyes seemed blinded with a sort of mist; then everything
went sort o’ dark green round me, and I began sagging at the knees. I could still feel her arms round me, and remember being surprised at her strength, but it seemed as if she’d transferred her lips to my throat. I kept getting weaker and weaker with a sort of languorous ecstasy, if that means anything to you. Rather like sinking to sleep in a soft dry bed with a big drink of brandy tucked under your belt after you’re dog-tired with cold and exposure. Next thing I knew I’d toppled over and fallen down the steps with no more strength in my knees than a rag doll has. I must have got an awful crack on the head when I went down, for I passed out completely, and the next thing I remember was waking to find you gentlemen working over me. Tell me, did I dream it all? I’m—just—about—played—out.”
The sentence trailed off slowly, as if he were falling to sleep, and his head dropped forward while his hands slipped nervelessly from his lap, trailing flaccidly to the floor.
“Has he gone?” I whispered as de Grandin sprang across the room and ripped his collar open.
“Not quite,” he answered. “More amyl nitrite, if you please; he will revive in a moment, but go home he shall not unless he promises not to destroy himself. Mon Dieu, destroyed he would be, body and soul, were he to put a bullet through his brain before—ah-ha? Behold, Friend Trowbridge, it is even as I feared!”
Against the young man’s throat there showed two tiny perforated wounds, as though a fine needle had been thrust through a fold of skin.
“H’m,” I commented. “If there were four of them I’d say a snake had bitten him.”
“She has! Name of a little blue man, she has!” he retorted. “A serpent more virulent and subtle than any which goes on its belly has sunk her fangs in him; he is envenomed surely as if he had been a victim of a cobra’s bite; but by the wings of Jacob’s Angel we shall thwart her, my friend. We shall show her Jules de Grandin must be reckoned with—her, and that fish-eyed paramour of hers as well, or may I eat stewed turnips for my Christmas dinner and wash them down with ditch-water!”
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 11
