The Best of Jules de Grandin

by Seabury Quinn

  “Morbleu, my friend, you look as if you’d seen a most unpleasant ghost!” de Grandin told me as I joined them at the bar and reached unsteadily for a drink.

  “I have,” I answered with a shudder. “A most unpleasant one.”

  The Green God’s Ring

  ST. DUNSTAN’S WAS PACKED to overflowing. Expectantly smiling ladies in cool crêpe and frilly chiffon crowded against perspiring gentlemen in formal afternoon dress while they craned necks and strained ears. Aisles, chancel, sanctuary, were embowered in July roses and long trailing garlands of southern smilax, the air was heavy with the humid warmth of summer noon, the scent of flowers and the perfume from the women’s hair and clothes.

  The dean of the Cathedral Chapter, the red of his Cambridge hood in pleasing contrast to the spotless white of linen surplice and sleek black cassock, pronounced the fateful words, his calm clear voice a steady mentor for the bridegroom’s faltering echo:

  “I, Wade, take thee Melanie to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward—”

  “From this day forward,” Dean Quincy repeated, smiling with gentle tolerance. In forty years of priesthood he had seen more than one bridegroom go suddenly dumb. “From this day forward, for better, for worse—”

  His smile lost something of its amusement, his florid, smooth-shaven face assumed an expression of mingled surprise and consternation which in other circumstances would have seemed comic. Swaying back and forth from toes to heels, from heels to toes, the bridegroom balanced uncertainly a moment, then with a single short, hard, retching cough fell forward like an overturned image, the gilded hilt of his dress sword jangling harshly on the pavement of the chancel.

  For what seemed half a minute the bride looked down at the fallen groom with wide, horrified eyes, then, flowing lace veil billowing about her like wind-driven foam, she dropped to her knees, thrust a lace-sheathed arm beneath his neck and raised his head to pillow it against the satin and seed pearls of her bodice. “Wade,” she whispered in a passionless, cold little voice that carried to the farthest corner of the death-still church. “Oh, Wade, my belovèd!”

  Quickly, with the quiet efficiency bred of their training, the young Naval officers attending the fallen bridegroom wheeled in their places and strode down the aisle to shepherd panic-stricken guests from their pews.

  “Nothin’ serious; nothin’ at all,” a lad who would not see his twenty-fifth birthday for another two years whispered soothingly through trembling lips as he motioned Jules de Grandin and me from our places. “Lieutenant Hardison is subject to these spells. Quite all right, I assure you. Ceremony will be finished in private—in the vestry room when he’s come out of it. See you at the reception in a little while. Everything’s all right. Quite—”

  The pupils of de Grandin’s little round blue eyes seemed to have expanded like those of an alert tomcat, and his delicate, slim nostrils twitched as though they sought to capture an elusive scent. “Mais oui, mon brave,” he nodded approval of the young one-striper’s tact. “We understand. Certainement. But me, I am a physician, and this is my good friend, Dr. Trowbridge—”

  “Oh, are you, sir?” the lad broke in almost beseechingly. “Then for God’s sake go take a look at him; we can’t imagine—”

  “But of course not, mon enfant. Diagnosis is not your trade,” the small Frenchman whispered. “Do you prevail upon the congregation to depart while we—attendez-moi, Friend Trowbridge,” he ordered in a low voice as he tiptoed toward the chancel where the stricken bride still knelt and nursed the stricken bridegroom’s head against her bosom.

  “Sacré nom!” he almost barked the exclamation as he came to a halt by the tragic tableau formed by the kneeling bride and supine man. “C’est cela même.”

  There was no doubting his terse comment. In the glassy-eyed, hang-jawed expression of the bridegroom’s face we read the trade mark of the King of Terrors. Doctors, soldiers and morticians recognize death at a glance.

  “Come, Melanie,” Mrs. Thurmond put a trembling hand upon her daughter’s shoulder. “We must get Wade to a doctor, and—”

  “A doctor?” the girl’s voice was small and still as a night breeze among the branches. “What can a doctor do for my poor murdered darling? Oh, Wade, my dear, my dear,” she bent until her lips were at his ear, “I loved you so, and I’m your murderess.”

  “Non, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin denied softly. “You must not say so. It may be we can help you—”

  “Help? Ha!” she almost spit the exclamation at him. “What help can there be for him—or me? Go away—get out—all of you!” she swept the ring of pitying faces with hard bright eyes almost void of all expression. “Get out, I tell you, and leave me with my dead!”

  De Grandin drew the slim black brows that were in such sharp contrast to his wheat blond hair down in a sudden frown. “Mademoiselle,” his voice was cold as icy spray against her face, “You ask if any one can help you, and I reply they can. I, Jules de Grandin can help you, despite the evil plans of pisacha, bhirta and preta, shahini and rakshasha, I can help—”

  The girl cringed from his words as from a whip. “Pisacha, bhirta and preta,” she repeated in a trembling, terrified whisper. “You know—”

  “Not altogether, Mademoiselle,” he answered, “but I shall find out, you may be assured.”

  “What is it you would have me do?”

  “Go hence and leave us to do that which must needs be done. Anon I shall call on you, and if what I have the intuition to suspect is true, tenez, who knows?”

  She drew a kneeling cushion from the step before the altar rail and eased the dead boy’s head down to it. “Be kind, be gentle with him, won’t you?” she begged. “Good-by, my darling, for a little while,” she laid a light kiss on the pale face pillowed on the crimson cushion. “Good-by—” Tears came at last to her relief and, weeping piteously, she stumbled to her mother’s waiting arms and tottered to the vestry room.

  “HEART?” I HAZARDED AS the bridal party left us alone with the dead man.

  “I should think not,” he denied with a shake of his head. “He was on the Navy’s active list, that one, and those with cardiac affections do not rate that.”

  “Perhaps it was the heat—”

  “Not if Jules de Grandin knows his heat prostration symptoms, and he has spent much time near the Equator. The fires of hell would have been cold beside the temperature in here when all those curious ones were assembled to see this poor one and his belovèd plight their troth, but did he not seem well enough when he came forth to meet her at the chancel steps? Men who will fall prone on their faces in heat collapse show symptoms of distress beforehand. Yes, of course. Did you see his color? Excellent, was it not? But certainly. Bronzed from the sea and sun, au teint vermeil de bon santé. We were not thirty feet away, and could see perfectly. He had none of that pallor that betokens heat stroke. No.”

  “Well, then”—I was a little nettled at the cavalier way he dismissed my diagnoses—“ what d’ye think it was?”

  He lifted narrow shoulders in a shrug that was a masterpiece of disavowal of responsibility. “Le bon Dieu knows, and He keeps His own counsel. Perhaps we shall be wiser when the autopsy is done.”

  We left the relatively cool shadow of the church and stepped out to the sun-baked noonday street. “If you will be so kind, I think that I should like to call on the good Sergeant Costello,” he told me as we reached my parked car.

  “Why Costello?” I asked. “It’s a case of sudden unexplained death, and as such one for the coroner, but as for any criminal element—”

  “Perhaps,” he agreed, seeming only half aware of what we talked of. “Perhaps not. At any rate, I think there are some things about this case in which the Sergeant will be interested.”

  We drove a few blocks in silence, then: “What was that gibberish you talked to Melanie?” I asked, my curiosity bettering my pique. “That stuff about your being able to help her despite the evil plans of the thingabobs and whatcham
aycallems? It sounded like pure double talk to me, but she seemed to understand it.”

  He chuckled softly. “The pisacha, bhirta and preta? The shahini and rakshasha?”

  “That sounds like it.”

  “That, my friend, was what you call the random shot, the drawing of the bow at venture. I had what you would call the hunch.”

  “How d’ye mean?”

  “Did you observe the ring upon the index finger of her right hand?”

  “You mean the big red gold band set with a green cartouche?”

  “Précisément.”

  “Not particularly. It struck me as an odd sort of ornament to wear to her wedding, more like a piece of costume jewelry than an appropriate bridal decoration, still these modern youngsters—”

  “That modern youngster, my friend, did not wear that ring because she wanted to.”

  “No? Why, then?”

  “Because she had to.”

  “Oh, come, now. You can’t mean—”

  “I can and do, my friend. Did not you notice the device cut into its setting?”

  “Why, no. What was it?”

  “It represented a four-faced, eight-armed monstrosity holding a straining woman in unbreakable embrace. The great God Siva—”

  “Siva? You mean the Hindu deity?”

  “Perfectly. He is a veritable chameleon, that one, and can change his form and color at a whim. Sometimes he is as mild and gentle as a lamb, but mostly he is fierce and passionate as a tiger. Indeed, his lamb-like attributes are generally a disguise, for underneath the softness is the cruelty of his base nature. Tiens, I think that he is best described as Bhirta, the Terrible.”

  “And those others with outlandish names?”

  “The pisacha and preta are a race of most unlovely demons, and like them are the rakshasha and shahini. They attend Siva in his attribute of Bhirta the Terrible as imps attend on Satan, doing his foul bidding and, if such a thing be possible, bettering his instructions.”

  “Well?”

  “By no means, my friend, not at all. It is not well, but very bad indeed. A Christian maiden has no business wearing such a talisman, and when I saw it on her finger I assumed that she might know something of its significance. Accordingly I spoke to her of the Four-Faced One, Bhirta and his attendant implings, the shahini, raksash and pischa. Parbleu, she understood me well enough. Altogether too well, I damn think.”

  “She seemed to, but—”

  “There are no buts, my friend. She understood me. Anon I shall understand her. Now let us interview the good Costello.”

  DETECTIVE-SERGEANT JEREMIAH COSTELLO WAS in the act of putting down the telephone as we walked into his office. “Good afternoon, sors,” he greeted as he fastened a wilted collar and began knotting a moist necktie. “’Tis glad I’d be to welcome ye at any other time, but jist now I’m in a terin’ hurry. Some swell has bumped himself off at a fashionable wedding, or if he didn’t exactly do it, he died in most suspicious circumstances, an’—”

  “It would not be Lieutenant Wade Hardison you have reference to?”

  “Bedad, sor, it ain’t Mickey Mouse!”

  “Perhaps, then, we can be of some assistance. We were present when it happened.”

  “Were ye, indeed, sor? What kilt ’im?”

  “I should like to know that very much indeed, my friend. That is why I am here. It does not make the sense. One moment he is hale and hearty, the next he falls down dead before our eyes. I have seen men shot through the brain fall in the same way. Death must have been instantaneous—”

  “An’ ye’ve no hunch wot caused it?”

  “I have, indeed, mon vieux, but it is no more than the avis indirect—what you would call the hunch.”

  “Okay, sor, let’s git goin’. Where to first?”

  “Will you accompany me to the bride’s house? I should like to interview her, but without official sanction it might be difficult.”

  “Howly Mackerel! Ye’re not tellin’ me she done it—”

  “We have not yet arrived at the telling point, mon ami. Just now we ask the questions and collect the answers; later we shall assemble them like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Perhaps when we have completed the mosaic we shall know some things that we do not suspect now.”

  “I getcha,” Costello nodded. “Let’s be on our way, sors.”

  THE THURMOND PLACE IN Chattahoochee Avenue seemed cloaked in brooding grief as we drove up the wide driveway to the low, pillared front porch. A cemetery quiet filled the air, the hushed, tiptoe silence of the sickroom or the funeral chapel. The festive decorations of the house and grounds were as incongruous in that atmosphere of tragedy as rouge and paint upon the cheeks and lips of a corpse.

  “Miss Melanie is too ill to be seen,” the butler informed us in answer to Costello’s inquiry. “The doctor has just left, and—”

  “Present our compliments to her, if you please,” de Grandin interrupted suavely. “She will see us, I make no doubt. Tell her it is the gentleman with whom she talked at the church—the one who promised her protection from Bhirta. Do you understand?”

  “Bhirta?” the servant repeated wonderingly.

  “Your accent leaves something to be desired, but it will serve. Do not delay, if you please, for I am not a patient person. By no means.”

  Draped in a sheer convent-made nightrobe that had been part of her trousseau, Melanie Thurmond lay rigid as death upon the big colonial sleigh bed of her chamber, a madeira sheet covering her to the bosom, her long auburn hair spread about her corpse-pale face like a rose gold nimbus framing an ivory ikon. Straight before her, with set, unseeing eyes she gazed, only the faint dilation of her delicate nostrils and the rhythmic rise and fall of her bosom testifying she had not already joined her stricken lover in the place he had gone a short hour before.

  The little Frenchman approached the bed silently, bent and took her flaccid hand in his and raised it to his lips. “Ma pauvre,” he murmured. “It is truly I. I have come to help you, as I promised.”

  The ghost of a tired little smile touched her pale lips as she turned her head slowly on the pillow and looked at him with wide-set, tearless sepia eyes. “I knew that it would come,” she told him in a hopeless little voice. Her words were slow and mechanical, her voice almost expressionless, as though she were rehearsing a half-learned lesson: “It had to be. I should have known it. I’m really Wade’s murderess.”

  “Howly Mither!” Costello ejaculated softly, and de Grandin turned a sudden fierce frown on him.

  “Comment?” he asked softly. “How do you mean that, ma petite roitelette?”

  She shook her head wearily from side to side and a small frown gathered between her brows. “Somehow, I can’t seem to think clearly. My brain seems seething—boiling like a cauldron—”

  “Précisément, exactement, au juste,” de Grandin agreed with a vigorous nod. “You have right, my little poor one. The brain, she is astew with all this trouble, and when she stews the recrement comes to the surface. Come, let us skim it off together, thou and I”—he made a gesture as if spooning something up and tossing it away. “Thus we shall rid our minds of dross and come at last to the sweet, unadulterated truth. How did it all start, if you please? What made you know it had to happen, and why do you accuse yourself all falsely of the murder of your amoureux?”

  A little shudder shook the girl’s slim frame, but a hint of color in her pallid cheeks told of a returning interest in life. “It all began with The Light of Asia.”

  “Quoi?” de Grandin’s slim brows rose in Saracenic arches. “You have reference to the poem by Sir Edward Arnold?”

  “Oh, no. This Light of Asia was an Oriental bazaar in East Fifty-Sixth Street. The girls from Briarly were in the habit of dropping in there for little curios—quaint little gifts for people who already seemed to have everything, you know.

  “It was a lovely place. No daylight ever penetrated there. Two great vases stood on ebony stands in the shop windows, and behind them
heavy curtains of brocaded cloth of gold shut off the light from outside as effectively as solid doors. The shop—if you could call it that—was illuminated by lamps that burned scented oil and were encased in frames of carved and pierced teakwood. These, and two great green candles as tall as a man, gave all the light there was. The floors were covered with thick, shining Indian rugs, and lustrous embroideries hung against the walls. The stock was not on shelves, but displayed in cabinets of buhl and teak and Indian cedar—all sorts of lovely things: carved ivories and moulded silver, hand-worked gold and tortoise-shell, amethyst and topaz, jade and brass and lovely blue and green enamel, and over everything there hung the scent of incense, curiously and pungently sweet; it lacked the usual cloying, heavy fragrance of the ordinary incense, yet it was wonderfully penetrating, almost hypnotic.”

  De Grandin nodded. “An interesting place, one gathers. And then—”

  “I’d been to The Light of Asia half a dozen times before I saw The Green One.”

  “The Green One? Qui diable?”

  “At the back of the shop there was a pair of double doors of bright vermilion lacquer framed by exquisitely embroidered panels. I’d often wondered what lay behind them. Then one day I found out! It was a rainy afternoon and I’d dropped into The Light as much to escape getting wet as to shop. There was no other customer in the place, and no one seemed in attendance, so I just wandered about, admiring the little bits of virtu in the cabinets and noting new additions to the stock, and suddenly I found myself at the rear of the shop, before the doors that had intrigued me so. There was no one around, as I told you, and after a hasty glance to make sure I was not observed, I put my hand out to the nearer door. It opened to my touch, as if it needed only a slight pressure to release its catch, and there in a gilded niche sat the ugliest idol I had ever seen.