The Emperor's Snuff-Box

by John Dickson Carr

  Ned was ill, he was hurt, he was unconscious. “Not expected to recover.” In her own danger, she was forgetting his. Could she be of any use if she threw her bonnet over the windmill, defying the whole tribe of Lawes, and went to Ned? At the moment she couldn’t even telephone, or write him a letter….

  Letter.

  Standing in the cool shadow of the rue des Anges, Eve’s fingers closed round her handbag. She opened the bag, and peered at the rather crumpled envelope inside.

  Eve crossed the rue des Anges with a firm stride, and stopped under the street lamp not far from her own gate. She examined the gray envelope, sealed, with her name written across it in small French script. Delivered by hand, dropped into the letter box of a house where she did not live. There could be nothing either formidable or sinister about an ordinary envelope. Yet Eve felt the slow, hard beating of her heart, and a warmth coming up into her throat, as she tore it open. The brief note inside was in French, unsigned.

  If madame wishes to learn something which will be of value to her in her present predicament, let her call at number 17, rue de la Harpe, at any time after ten o’clock. The door is open. Please to enter.

  Overhead, the leaves whispered. They threw wavering shadows across the gray paper.

  Eve raised her eyes. Ahead of her was her own villa, where Yvette Latour waited to prepare her dinner in the absence of the cook. Eve folded up the note, and put it back in her handbag.

  She had hardly touched the doorbell before Yvette, as competent and expressionless as ever, opened the door from inside.

  “Madame’s dinner is ready,” Yvette told her. “It has been ready this half-hour.”

  “I don’t want any dinner.”

  “But madame must have some dinner. It is necessary to keep one’s strength up.”

  “Why?” said Eve.

  She had been walking towards the stairs, brushing past her companion, in the bright little jewel-box of a hall with its clocks and mirrors. Now she turned round, and flung out the question. Never had she been so conscious of the fact that she and Yvette were alone in the house.

  “I said, why?” repeated Eve.

  “Faith, madame,” returned Yvette, with an unexpected crow of good-nature which avoided the challenge. Yvette’s eyes widened. She put her hands, as strong as a wrestler’s, on her hips. “It is necessary for all of us to keep up our strength in this life. Isn’t it?”

  “Why did you lock me out of the house on the night Sir Maurice Lawes was killed?”

  Now you could distinctly hear the ticking of the clocks.

  “Madame?”

  “You heard me!”

  “I heard madame. But I did not comprehend her.”

  “What have you told the police about me?” demanded Eve. She felt her heart contract and her cheeks begin to burn.

  “Madame?”

  “Why hasn’t my white lace negligée come back from the cleaner’s?”

  “Alas, madame! I can’t say. Sometimes they take an interminable while, don’t they?—When will madame have her dinner?”

  The challenge, dropped, was shattered like one of Sir Maurice Lawes’s porcelain plates.

  “I tell you I don’t want any dinner,” said Eve, with her foot on the first tread of the stairs. “I am going to my room.”

  “I may perhaps bring madame some sandwiches?”

  “Yes, if you like. And some coffee.”

  “Bien, madame. Will madame be going out again tonight?”

  “Perhaps. I don’t know.”

  And she ran up the stairs.

  In her bedroom, the damask curtains had been drawn and the light turned on over the dressing-table. Eve closed the door. She was short of breath; there seemed to be a large hollow inside her chest, where a small pulse beat; her knees felt shaky and the blood now seemed to be in her head rather than her cheeks. Dropping into an easy chair, she tried to relax.

  Number 17, rue de la Harpe. Number 17, rue de la Harpe. Number 17, rue de la Harpe.

  There was no clock in the bedroom. Eve slipped down the hall, to a spare room, and brought one. It seemed to tick as menacingly as a bomb. She put it on the chest of drawers, and then went into the bathroom to wash her hands and face. When she returned, a plate of sandwiches and a pot of filtered coffee had been set out neatly on a side table. Though she could eat nothing, she drank some coffee and smoked many cigarettes while the hands of the clock crawled from eight-thirty to nine, and from nine-thirty towards ten.

  She had attended a trial for murder once, at Paris. Ned had taken her, thinking it all a good joke. What had surprised her was the amount of shouting. The judges—there were several of them, wearing bibs and flat-topped caps—stormed at the prisoner as much as did the prosecuting counsel, exhorting him to confess.

  At the time it had seemed foreign and unpleasantly funny. But it wasn’t funny for the grimy-faced wretch on trial, gripping the edge of the dock with black nails, and screaming back at them. When they brought him into court, two locks clanged on a door opening into a passage that smelled of creosote. A whiff of it came back to Eve. It suggested what might happen. She was so absorbed in these images that she hardly heard the noises in the street below.

  But she heard the doorbell ring.

  There was a mutter of voices downstairs. On the stairs Eve heard the pad, pad, pad of feet on carpet, as Yvette mounted those steps faster than she had ever done before. Yvette knocked at the bedroom door. Yvette remained respectful.

  “There are many policemen downstairs, madame,” she reported. The sheer joyousness of her tone, the naked satisfaction as at a task well done, turned Eve’s mouth dry. “Shall I tell them that madame will be down to see them?”

  That voice rang in Eve’s ears for several seconds after the other had ceased to speak.

  “Put them in the front drawing room,” Eve heard herself saying. “I shall be down in one moment.”

  “Bien, madame.”

  Eve got to her feet as the door closed. She went to the wardrobe and took out a short fur wrap, which she fastened round her neck. She looked in her handbag to make sure that she had money. Then she switched off the light and slipped out into the hall.

  Avoiding the loose stair-rod, she ran downstairs so lightly that no one heard her. She had timed Yvette’s progress as though she had been able to imagine every move. The mutter of voices now proceeded from the front drawing room; the door was only partly open and Yvette’s back turned, hand raised in a gesture of hospitality to the law. Though Eve caught one brief glimpse of an eye and a mustache, she did not believe she had been seen. Two seconds more, and she was out through the dark dining room to the even darker kitchen.

  Again, as on another occasion, she unfastened the spring lock of the back door. But this time she closed it behind her. She ascended the steps to the dew-wet back garden, while the beam of the inland lighthouse swung overhead. She hurried out of the back gate into the lane. Three minutes later—having disturbed nothing except a frantic dog chained in somebody’s garden—she was hailing a taxi in the dim stateliness of the Boulevard du Casino.

  “Number seventeen, rue de la Harpe,” said Eve.

  XIII

  “THIS IS IT?”

  “Yes, madame,” said the taxi-driver. “Number seventeen, rue de la Harpe.”

  “It is a private house?”

  “No, madame. It is a shop. A flower-shop.”

  The street, it developed, was to be found in the un-fashionable part of La Bandelette: that is to say, close to the promenade and the sea-front. Most of the English money-spinners who patronized La Bandelette used to be very scornful of this district, because it looked (and was) exactly like Weston or Paignton or Folkestone.

  By day it throbbed, gray and slaty, a hive of small streets and shops struck with souvenir-colors, bristling in toy spades and buckets and windmills, yellow Kodak-signs, decorous family bars. But at night, as autumn lengthened, most of these streets turned lightless and damp. The rue de la Harpe, curving between tall
houses, swallowed up the taxi. When the cab drew up before a dark shop-front, Eve felt a panic reluctance to get out.

  She sat with her hand on the half-open door, looking at the driver in the dim glow of the meter-lamp.

  “A—a flower shop?” she repeated.

  “Veritably, madame.” The driver pointed to white enamel lettering just visible against the dim shop-window. “‘At the Garden of Paradise. Choice Blooms Sold Here.’ It is closed, you understand,” he added helpfully.

  “So I see.”

  “Would madame wish me to take her somewhere else?”

  “No. This will do.” Eve climbed out. Still she hesitated. “You don’t happen to know who owns the shop, do you?”

  “Ah! The owner. No,” said the driver, after giving this careful consideration. “As to the owner, I can’t say. But the patronne I know very well indeed. The patronne is Mademoiselle Latour. Mademoiselle Prue for short. A very genteel young lady.”

  “Latour?”

  “Yes, madame. Is madame unwell?”

  “No! Has she a relation, a sister or aunt perhaps, named Yvette Latour?”

  The driver stared at her.

  “My word, now, but that’s too big an order! I regret, madame, that I can’t say. Only the shop I know, which is spick-and-span and pretty like mademoiselle herself.” (Here Eve felt curious eyes fixed on her in the gloom). “Would madame wish that I wait here for her?”

  “No. Yes! Yes, perhaps you’d better.”

  Though she started to ask another question, Eve thought better of it. She turned round abruptly and hurried across the pavement to the flower shop.

  Behind her the impassive taxi-driver was thinking:

  My God, but that is a very pretty piece, and clearly English! Is it possible, now, that Mademoiselle Prue may have been playing about with madame’s boy-friend, and madame comes here to execute vengeance? In that case, Marcel old man, one had better let in one’s clutch and scram out of here quickly, in case there is vitriol-throwing. Come to think, however, the English do not often throw vitriol. But they have formidable tempers, as I have seen when meester gets drunk and missus se parle de ça. Yes: one foresees something rather pleasant and interesting without being lethal. And, besides, she owes me eight francs forty.

  Eve’s own thoughts were less simply straightforward than these.

  She paused outside the shop door. Beside it was the clean, polished plate-glass window, beyond which little could be seen. The edge of a moon showed over dark roof-tops, but it was reflected in the window and rendered the glass opaque.

  Any time after ten o’clock. The door is open. Please to enter.

  Eve turned the knob, and found the door open. She pushed it wide, expecting momentarily to hear the ping of a bell above it. Still nothing happened. Silence, and darkness. Leaving the door wide open, not without strong fears as to what this might mean but reassured by the presence of the taxi-driver in the street outside, Eve entered the shop.

  Still nothing….

  Cool, moist, fragrant air blew out at her, settling round as she passed. It did not appear to be a large shop. Close against the window, a covered bird cage hung on a chain from the low ceiling. The edge of moonlight lay along the floor, showing only the ghostliness of a flower-bedizened room and raising on one wall the shadow of a funeral-wreath.

  She had passed a counter and cash register, among mingled flower scents thinned by damp as though by water, before she noticed a crack of yellow light at the back of the shop. It lay along the floor under a heavy portière which closed off the doorway to a rear room. And, at the same moment, a girl’s sprightly voice sang out from behind the portière.

  “Who is there?” the voice called in French.

  Eve walked forward, and drew aside the portière.

  The only word to describe that scene was domesticity. The place oozed domesticity. She was looking into a small, snug sitting-room, the walls papered in regrettable taste but breathing of home.

  The mantelpiece consisted of many wooden pigeon holes built round a mirror, and in the grate burned a bright fire of those round coals which the French call boulets. There was a fringed lamp on the center table. There was a sofa, with dolls. Over the piano hung a framed family-group photograph.

  Mademoiselle Prue herself, composed and agreeable, sat in an easy chair by the lamp. Eve had never seen her before, but M. Goron or Dermot Kinross would have recognized her. She was dressed in very good taste, and had extraordinary poise. Her large, dark, demure eyes were raised to Eve. A sewing-basket stood on the table beside her; at the moment she was engaged in biting off a thread, as she mended a seam of the pink elastic suspender-belt in her hands. It was this more than anything else which gave the scene its air of cozy domesticity and slippered ease.

  Across from her sat Toby Lawes.

  Mademoiselle Prue rose to her feet, putting down needle, thread, and suspender-belt.

  “Ah, madame!” she said briskly. “You have received my note, then? That is good. Please come in.”

  There was a long silence.

  Eve’s first impulse, it is regrettable to state, was to laugh in Toby’s face. But this wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny at all.

  Toby sat rigid. He looked back at Eve as though he were fascinated, and could not avoid her eye. Color, dull red, slowly suffused his face until it seemed bursting; if you had wanted an index of his conscience, you could read it, with a clearness painful to watch, in every line of his expression. Any man who saw him then would have felt almost sorry for him.

  Eve thought: At any minute, now, I am going to get good and mad. But for the moment I can’t. I can’t.

  “You—you wrote that note?” she heard herself saying.

  “I regret!” replied Prue, with an anxious smile and real concern. “But, madame, it is necessary to be practical.”

  She went over to Toby and kissed him perfunctorily on the forehead.

  “This poor Toby,” she said. “I have been his little friend for such a long time, yet I cannot seem to make him understand. And now it is necessary to speak frankly. Yes?”

  “Yes,” said Eve. “By all means.”

  Prue’s pretty face again became composed and self assured.

  “Madame, look you, I am no daughter of joy! I am a young girl of good character and family.” She pointed to the photograph over the piano. “That is my papa. That is my mama. That is my Uncle Arsène. That is my sister Yvette. If I am sometimes entrapped into a moment of weakness … well! Is that not the privilege of every woman who considers herself human?”

  Eve looked at Toby.

  Toby started to get up, but sat down again.

  “But mark you!” said Prue. “It was understood … or at least I so understood it, in my innocence … that M. Lawes’s intentions were honorable and that he meant marriage. Then comes the announcement of his betrothal to you. No, no, no, no!” Her voice grew hollow with reproach. “I ask you! Was that fair? Was it just? Was it honorable?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Still, I knew these men! My sister Yvette, she is furious. She says she will find a way to break off this marriage and put me in the arms of M. Lawes.”

  “Is that true, now?” said Eve, now beginning to understand many things.

  “But me, I am not like that. I run after nobody. Je m’en fous de ca! If this Tobee is cold, there are other fish in the sea. But it is only fair, I say—and madame as a woman will agree with me—that some small compensation should be made to me for my loss of time and the violation of my natural feelings. Yes?”

  Toby found his voice.

  “You wrote her a note …?” he began in a dazed voice.

  Prue paid no attention to him, beyond giving him an absent-mindedly affectionate smile. Her real business was with Eve.

  “I ask him please if he will give me this compensation, so that we can part friends. I wish him well. I congratulate him on his marriage. But he puts me off, saying that he is hard up.”

  Prue�
�s glance showed what she thought of this.

  “Then his papa dies. That is very sad,”—Prue looked honestly concerned, —“and for almost a week I do not trouble him, except to express my sympathy. Besides, he says that as his papa’s heir he will now be able to deal generously with me. But mark! Only yesterday he says that his papa’s affairs of business are in a mess; that there is not much money; and that my neighbor, M. Veille the art-dealer, presses for payment on a broken snuff-box costing, incredible to imagine, seven hundred and fifty thousand francs.”

  “This note…” Toby began.

  Still Prue addressed herself to Eve.

  “Yes, I wrote it,” she acknowledged. “My sister Yvette does not know that I wrote it. It is an idea of my own.”

  “Why did you write it?” said Eve.

  “Madame, can you ask?”

  “I do ask.”

  “To anyone of sensibility,” said Prue, with pouting reproach, “it is apparent.” She went over and smoothed Toby’s hair. “I am very fond of this poor Tobee…”

  The gentleman in question jumped to his feet.

  “And, faith, I am not rich. Though I think you will admit,” explained Prue, teetering on her toes to survey herself complacently in the mirror over the fireplace, “that I turn myself out rather well for all that. Hein?”

  “Beautifully!”

  “Well! Madame is rich, or so they tell me. Surely persons of sensibility, of refinement, should comprehend these things without diagrams?”

  “I still don’t….”

  “Madame wishes to marry my poor Tobee. Desolated as I am to lose him, I am what you call a good sport. I am independent. I interfere with nobody. But in these things, voyons, it is necessary to be practical. Therefore if madame herself would consent to make some small compensation, I am sure that matters could be adjusted with the best will in the world.”

  Again there was a long silence.

  “Why does madame start to laugh?” demanded Prue, in a different and sharper voice.

  “I beg your pardon. I wasn’t laughing. That is—not really. May I sit down?”

  “But of course! How I am forgetting my manners! Here: have this chair. It is Tobee’s favorite.”