“I’m quite alive,” I answered as I got unsteadily upon my feet and stretched my arms and legs tentatively. “Pretty well mauled and shaken, but—”
”S-s-sh,” warned de Grandin. “There is another we must deal with. Holà l’haut!” he called. “Will you come forth, Monsieur, or do we deal with you as we dealt with your pet?”
STARK DESOLATION REIGNED WITHIN the ruined church. Floors sagged uncertainly and groaned protestingly beneath our feet; the cheap pine pews were cracked and broken, fallen in upon themselves; throughout the place the musty, faintly acrid smell of rotting wood hung dank and heavy, like miasmic vapors of a marsh in autumn. Another smell was noticeable, too; the ammonia-laden scent of pent-up animals, such as hovers in the air of prisons, lazarets and primate houses at the zoo.
Guided by the odor and the searching beam shot by de Grandin’s flashlight, we crossed the sagging floor with cautious steps until we reached the little eminence where in the former days the pulpit stood. There, like the obscene parody of a tabernacle, stood a great chest, some eight feet square, constructed of stout rough-sawn planks and barred across the front with iron uprights. A small dishpan half filled with water and the litter of melon rinds told us this had been the prison of the dead gorilla.
De Grandin stooped and looked inside the cage. “Le pauvre sauvage,” he murmured. “It was in this pen he dwelt. It was inhuman—pardieu!” Bending quickly he retrieved a shred of orange satin. He raised it to his nose, then passed it to us. It was redolent of musk.
“So, then, Jules de Grandin is the fool, the imbécile, the simpleton, the ninny, the chaser-after-shadows, hein?” he demanded. “Come, let us follow through our quest.”
Th’ place seems empty, sor,” Costello said as, following the wall, we worked our way toward the building’s front. “If there wuz anny body here—Howly Mither!”
Across our path, like a doll cast aside by a peevish child there lay a grotesque object. The breath stopped in my throat, for the thing was gruesomely suggestive of a human body, but as de Grandin played his flashlight on it we saw it was a life-sized dummy of a woman. It was some five feet tall, the head was decorated by a blond bobbed wig, and it was clothed in well-made sports clothes—knit pull-over, a kilted skirt of rough tweed, Shetland socks, tan heelless shoes—the sort of costume worn by eight in ten high school and college girls. As we bent to look at it the cloyingly sweet scent of musk assailed our nostrils.
“Is not all plain?—does it not leap to meet the eye?” de Grandin asked. “This was the implement of training. That hairy one out yonder had been trained for years to seek and bring back this musk-scented dummy. When he was letter-perfect in discovering and bringing back this lifeless simulacrum, his master sent him to the harder task of seeking out and stealing living girls who had the scent of musk upon them. Ha, one can see it plainly—the great ape leaping through the shadowed trees, scaling the school roof as easily as you or I could walk the streets, sniffing, searching, playing at this game of hide-and-seek he had been taught. Then from the open window comes the perfume which shall tell him that his quest is finished; there in the lighted room he sees the animated version of the dummy he has learned to seize and carry to this sacré place. He enters. There is a scream of terror from his victim. His great hand closes on her throat and her cry dies out before it is half uttered; then through the treetops he comes to the chapel of the suicides, and underneath his arm there is—morbleu, and what in Satan’s name is that?”
As he lectured us he swung his flashlight in an arc, and as it pointed toward the ladder-hole that led up to the ruined belfry its darting ray picked up another form which lay half bathed in shadows, like a drowned body at the water’s edge.
It was—or had been—a man, but it lay across our path as awkwardly as the first dummy. Its arms and legs protruded at unnatural angles from its trunk, and though it lay breast down the head was turned, completely round so that the face looked up, and I went sick with disgust as I looked on what had once been human features, but were now so battered, flattened and blood-smeared that only staring, bulging eyes and broken teeth protruding through smashed lips told life had once pulsed underneath the hideous, shattered mask. Close beside one of the open, flaccid hands a heavy whip-stock lay, the sort of whip that animal trainers use to cow their savage pupils. A foot or so of plaited rawhide lash frayed from the weighted stock, for the long, cruel whip of braided leather had been ripped and pulled apart as though it had been made of thread.
“God rest ’is sinful soul!” Costello groaned. “Th’ gorilly musta turned on ’im an’ smashed ’im to a pulp. Looks like he’d tried to make a getaway, an’ got pulled down from them stheps, sor, don’t it?”
“By blue, it does; it most indubitably does,” de Grandin agreed. “He was a cruel one, this, but the whip he used to beat his ape into submission was powerless at the last. One can find it in his heart to understand the monster’s anger and desire for revenge. But pity for this one? Non! He was deserving of his fate, I damn think.”
“All th’ same, sor—Howly Saint Patrick, what’s that?” Almost overhead, so faint and weak as to be scarcely audible, there sounded a weak, whimpering moan.
“Up, up, my friends, it may be that we are in time to save her!” the little Frenchman cried, leaping up the palsied ladder like a seaman swarming up the ratlines.
We followed him as best we could and halted at the nest of crossbeams marking the old belfry. For a moment we stood silent, then simultaneously flashed our torches. The little spears of light stabbed through the shrouding darkness for a moment, and picked up a splash of brilliant orange in the opening where the bell had hung. Lashed to the bell-wheel was a girl’s slim form, arms and feet drawn back and tied with cruel knots to the spokes, her body bowed back in an arc against the wheel’s periphery. Her weight had drawn the wooden cycle down so that she hung dead-center at its bottom, but the fresh, strong rope spliced to the wheel-crank bore testimony to the torment she had been subjected to, the whirling-swinging torture of the mediæval bullwheel.
“Oh, please—please kill me!” she besought as the converging light beams played upon her pain-racked face. “Don’t swing me any more—I can’t—stand—” her plea trailed off in a thin whimpering mewl and her head fell forward.
“Courage, Mademoiselle,” the small Frenchman comforted. “We are come to take you home.”
“BUT NO, MON SERGENT,” Jules de Grandin shook his head in deprecation as he watched the ice cube slowly melting in his highball glass, “I have a great appreciation of myself, and am not at all averse to advertising, but in this case I must be anonymous. You it was who did it all, who figured out the African connection, and who found the hideaway to which the so unfortunate Miss Lefètre was conveyed. Friend Trowbridge and I did but go along to give you help; the credit must be yours. We shall show those fools down at headquarters if you are past your prime. We shall show them if you are unfit for crime detection. This case will make your reputation firm, and that you also found what happened to the Cogswell girl will add materially to your fame. Is it not so?”
“I only wish to God I did know what happened to poor Margaret Cogswell,” the big detective answered.
De Grandin’s smiling face went serious. “I have the fear that her fate was the same as that of Monsieur Cogswell’s first wife. You recall how she was mauled to death by a gorilla? I should not be surprized if that ten-times-cursed Everton gave the poor girl to his great ape for sport when he had tired of torturing her. Tomorrow you would be advised to take a squad of diggers to that chapel of the suicides and have them search for her remains. I doubt not you will find them.”
“An’ would ye tell me one thing more, sor?”
“A hundred, if you wish.”
“Why did th’ gorilly kill th’ Sidlo gur-rl instead o’ carryin’ her away?”
“The human mind is difficult enough to plumb; I fear I cannot look into an ape’s mentality and see the thoughts he thinks, mon vieux. When he had s
tolen Mademoiselle Lefètre and borne her to the ruined chapel of the suicides the ape turned rebel. He did not go back to his cage as he was wont to do, but set out on another expedition. His small mind worked in circles. Twice he had taken women from the Shelton School, he seems to have enjoyed the pastime, so went back for more. He paused upon the roof-ledge, wondering where he should seek next for victims, and to him through the damp night air the pungent scent the Sidlo girl affected came. Voilà, down into the room he dropped, intent on seizing her. She was well built and strongly muscled. Also she was very frightened. She did not swoon, nor struggle in his grasp, but fought him valiantly. Perhaps she hurt him with her pointed fingernails. En tout cas, she angered him, and so he broke her neck in peevish anger, as a child might break its doll, and, again child-like, he flung the broken toy away.
“It was a pity, too. She was so young, so beautiful, so vital. That she should die before she knew the joys of love—morbleu, it saddens me. Trowbridge, my friend, can you sit there thus and see me suffer so? Refill my glass, I beg you!”
The House Where Time Stood Still
THE FEBRUARY WIND WAS holding carnival outside, wrenching at the window fastenings, whooping round the corners of the house, roaring bawdy chansons down the chimney flues. But we were comfortable enough, with the study curtains drawn, the lamps aglow and two fresh oak logs upon the andirons taking up the blazing torch their dying predecessors flung them. Pleased with himself until his smugness irritated me, Jules de Grandin smiled down at the toe of his slim patent-leather pump, took a fresh sip of whisky-soda, and returned to the argument.
“But no, my friend,” he told me, “medicine the art is necessarily at odds with medicine the science. As followers of Æsculapius and practitioners of the healing art we are concerned with individual cases, in alleviating suffering in the patient we attend. We regard him as a person, a complete and all-important entity. Our chief concern for the time being is to bring about his full recovery, or if that is not possible, to spare him pain as far as in our power lies, n’est-ce-pas?”
“Of course,” I rejoined. “That’s the function of the doctor—”
“Mais non. Your term is poorly chosen. That is the function of the physician, the healer, the practitioner of medicine as an art. The doctor, the learned savant, the experimenting scientist, has a larger field. He is unconcerned with man the individual, the subspecies aeternitatis. Him he cannot see for bones and cells and tissues where micro-organisms breed and multiply to be a menace to the species as a whole. He deals with large, great bodies like—”
“Sir Haddingway Ingraham an’ Sergeant Costello, if ye plaze, sors,” interrupted Nora McGinnis from the study entrance.
“Yes, parbleu, exactly like them!” de Grandin burst out laughing as the two six-footers hesitated at the doorway, unable to come through together, undecided which should take precedence.
“Regard, observe them, if you please, Friend Trowbridge!” he ordered as he looked at the big visitors. “Quel type, mais quel type; morbleu, c’est incroyable!”
To say that the big Briton and the even bigger Celt were of a common type seemed little less than fantastic. Ingraham—Sir Haddingway Ingraham Jamison Ingraham, known to all his friends familiarly as Hiji, was as typically an Englishman of the Empire Builder sort as could be found in literature or on the stage. So big that he was almost gigantic, his face was long and narrow, high-cheeked, almost saddle-leather tanned, with little splayed-out lines of sun-wrinkles about the outer corners of his eyes. His hair was iron-gray, center-parted, smooth as only brilliantine and careful brushing could make it, and by contrast his small military mustache was as black as the straight brows that framed his deep-set penetrating hazel eyes. His dinner clothes were cut and draped with such perfection that they might as well have borne the label Saville Row in letters half a foot in height; and in his martial bearing, his age and his complexion, you could read the record of his service to his king and country as if campaign ribbons had adorned his jacket: the Aisne, Neuve Chapelle, the second Marne, and after that the jungle or the veldt of British Africa, or maybe India. He was English as roast beef or Yorkshire pudding, but not the kind of Briton who could be at home in London or the Isles, or anywhere within a thousand miles of Nelson’s monument, save for fleeting visits.
Costello was a perfect contrast. Fair as the other was dark, he still retained his ruddy countenance and smooth, fresh Irish skin, although his once-red hair was almost white. If Hiji was six feet in height the sergeant topped him by a full two inches; if the Englishman weighed fourteen stone the Celt outweighed him by a good ten pounds; if Ingraham’s lean, brown, well-manicured hand could strike a blow to floor an ox, Costello’s big, smooth-knuckled fist could stun a charging buffalo. His clothes were good material, but lacked elegance of cut and were plainly worn more for protective than for decorative purposes. Smooth-shaved, round-cheeked, he might have been an actor or a politician or, if his collar were reversed, a very worldly, very knowing, very Godly bishop, or a parish priest with long experience of the fallibility of human nature and the infinite compassion of the Lord.
Thus their dissidence. Amazingly, there was a subtle similarity. Each moved with positively tigerish grace that spoke of controlled power and almost limitless reserves of strength, and in the eyes of each there was that quality of seeing and appraising and recording everything they looked at, and of looking at everything within their range of vision without appearing to take note of anything. As usual, de Grandin was correct.
Each bore resemblance to the other, each was the perfect type of the born man-hunter, brave, shrewd, resourceful and implacable.
“But it is good to see you, mes amis!” de Grandin told them as he gave a hand to each and waved them to a seat beside the fire. “On such a night your company is like a breath of spring too long delayed. Me, I am delighted!”
“Revoltin’ little hypocrite, ain’t he?” Hiji turned to Costello, who nodded gloomy acquiescence.
“Comment? A hypocrite—I?” Amazement and quick-gathering wrath puckered the small Frenchman’s face as if he tasted something unendurably sour. “How do you say—”
“Quite,” Hiji cut in heavily. “Hypocrite’s the word, and nothin’ less. Pretendin’ to be glad to see us, and not offerin’ us a drink! On such a night, too. Disgustin’ is the word for it.”
“Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!” wailed de Grandin. “Oh, I am humiliated, I am desolated, I am—”
“Never mind expressions of embarrassment, you little devil. Pour that whisky; don’t be sparin’ o’ your elbow!”
In a moment Scotch and soda bubbled in the glasses. Ice tinkled in Costello’s. “None in mine, you blighted little thimblerigger; d’ye want to take up space reserved for whisky?” Hiji forbade when de Grandin would have dropped an ice-cube in his glass.
Refreshed, we faced each other in that silence of comradery which only men who have shared common perils know.
“And now, what brings you out on such a night?” de Grandin asked. “Smile and grin and play the innocent as you will, I am not to be imposed upon. I know you for the sybarites you are. Neither of you would thrust his great nose out of doors tonight unless compulsion forced him. Speak, thou great ungainly ones, thou hulking oafs, thou species of a pair of elephants. I wait your babbling confidences, but I do not wait with patience. Not I. My patience is as small as my thirst is great—and may I never see tomorrow’s sunrise if I see it sober!”
Hiji drained his glass and held it out to be refilled. “It’s about young Southerby,” he answered gloomily. “The poisonous little scorpion’s managed to get himself lost. He’s disappeared; vanished.”
“Ah? One is desolated at the news.” De Grandin leant back in his chair and grinned at Ingraham and Costello. “I am completely ravaged at intelligence of this one’s disappearance, for since I have abandoned criminal investigation in all its phases, I can look upon the case objectively, and see how seriously it affects you. May I prescribe an anodyne?” h
e motioned toward the syphon and decanter.
“Drop it, you little imp o’ Satan!” Ingraham replied gruffly. “This is serious business. Yesterday we had a matter of the greatest importance—and secrecy—to be transmitted to the embassy in Washington. There wasn’t a king’s messenger available, and we did not dare trust the papers to the post; so when young Southerby—dratted little idiot!—stepped in and told the Chief he’d do his Boy Scout’s good deed by runnin’ the dispatches down to Washington, they took him on. He’s been knocking round the consulate a year and more, gettin’ into everybody’s hair, and the Chief thought it would be a holiday for the staff to get him out from under foot awhile. The little blighter does know how to drive a car, I’ll say that for him; and he’s made the trip to Washington so often that he knows the road as well as he knows Broadway. Twelve hours ought to do the trip and leave him time for meals to spare, but the little hellion seems to have rolled right off the earth. There ain’t a trace o’ hide or hair of him—”
“But surely, you need not concern yourself with it,” de Grandin interrupted. “This is a matter for the police; the good Costello or the state constabulary, or the Federal agents.”
“And the newspapers and the wireless, not to mention the cinema,” broke in Hiji with a frown. “Costello’s not here officially. As my friend he’s volunteered to help me out. As a policeman he knows nothin’ of the case. You’ll appreciate my position when I tell you that these papers were so confidential that they’re not supposed to exist at all, and we simply can’t report Southerby’s disappearance to the police, nor let it leak out that he’s missin’ or was carryin’ anything to Washington. All the same, we’ve got to find those precious papers. The Chief made a bad blunder entrustin’ ’em to such a scatterbrain, and if we don’t get ’em back his head is goin’ to fall. Maybe his won’t be the only one—”
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 73
