menu_book Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI. IN THE BLACK PARLORS We walked slowly down the hall again, Ben-Colin and I. Now that the scene was beginning to resolve itself into definite personalities, now that voices and emotions had lifted it in my mind to absorbing reality, I felt my brain crystal clear and keyed to the highest. Many people were thronging the hall, talking excitedly. Before the door of the card room was a little group of

significant black-hatted men who waited in a kind of gloom, hands thrust in their pockets. One of them carried a collapsible camera. He was leaning against a Newell post of the stairs, negligently smoking a cigarette. The peculiar bloodhound snoop of the press was also much in evidence. When we entered the card room again, there were more men studying the position of the body. They gathered at some little distance to avoid the nauseating welter of blood.

With a detached and impersonal air, a fat man with whiskers, this must be the medical examiner, was taking notes and cocking his head at the body like an artist squinting for perspective. He made his last note with a flourish of the pen. Then he beckoned to two of the men. One of them set up a camera, fiddled with it a while, and the other prepared some powder in a flat pan. Presently there was a blinding flare of light, then the smoke and reek of flashlight

powder drifting across the dull lamp-glow. While they were preparing for more pictures, I tried to get the scene firmly photographed in my mind. There was the headless trunk, limbs frozen in that weird kneeling position. It was toppled forward so that the neck stump touched the floor, the back partly humped. One leg was doubled under, the other sprawled at a side angle. Both arms were doubled flat from the elbows, arms forward like the arms of the Sphinx,

fingers dug with claw-like tension into the carpet. Altogether it gave the impression that this headless beast was about to spring forward. The back of the dress coat was soaked, the entire shirt front crimson, and both arms were splattered so that thin red splashes daubed the back of the hands. Ben Cullen had replaced the head where it had been, some three feet away. Again, the flashlight powder glared over motionless men, blinding like an instant of terrifying death. One of the men

stepped forward, and with an enormous lump of chalk, such as tailors use for suit markings, he drew a line around the edges of the body. Afterwards, the medical examiner jerked a thumb over his shoulder, and in a tired voice said, All right, boys. Two of them lifted it up. It was becoming stiff, like a big plaster image in clothes, and started to bear it from the room. It passed by us, and Ben Cullen, coming out of his reverie, stopped for a moment the two who

were carrying the burden. Pulling at his mustache, he looked down at it for a time. He unclasped one of the hands and bent close. What he extracted from under one fingernail I could not at first see. It was a tiny bit of thread, colorless and nearly invisible. Ben Cullen put it in an envelope and motioned the bearers to go. A matter-of-fact voice saying, All right, boys, a jerk of the thumb towards the door. So that was how they carried a gentleman to his grave.

It was impersonal and curiously pathetic, with a jazz band to play the requiem. The medical examiner, notebook in hand, was addressing Ben Cullen. "'No more use for me here, Monsieur the Judge. What do you want done with the body, his relatives?' "'He had none,' said the detective. "'No close ones that I am aware of. Send it down for an autopsy. I want that report. And communicate with his attorneys.

They will see to the undertaker, unless his friends—' Ben Collins' smile was ugly, Care to take charge. That's all. Well, there seemed to be a few friends here. I wandered out of earshot.

It was a curious way to die, not so much in its tragedy as in its lack of simple dignity. Certainly the living Saligny must have cut a prouder figure than that, when you fancied the lift of that powerful body smashing a tennis ball white against a glare of dust and sun. Was he, as I imagined, a sort of swashbuckling, back-slapping chap? ingenuous and hearty with everybody,

a conscious d'Artagnan with a ready jealousy and an equally ready sympathy. There was the head with thick blonde hair and the startled wide-set eyes of an ox-like and docile brown, lips open on magnificent teeth.

Now it was all smeared with a glaze. Yes, Raoul, you must have carried that head to better purpose than being surrounded by jabbering and paunchy men, to be accidentally kicked and set rolling by somebody's casual boot. I went to the window. It was still open, red curtains flapping, and I leaned out to peer around.

A high-sailing moon lit the gray walls all about and shimmered on darkened windows across the street. Lying just below was a little yard, cut off by a wall from the pavement of the Rue Desaues. Far across the street, beyond the walls of the apartment houses, the Eiffel Tower blazed its running electrics against the sky. A living thing in loneliness.

All very still and cold. I craned my neck. Ben Cullen was right. It was, and I also say this in the light of what happened afterwards, and confirmed the statement that nobody had left that way,

impossible to leave the room by that window. On the floor above there were no windows at all to that side, merely a smooth upward run of stone for some twenty-odd feet to an overhanging roof, whose slope afforded neither a hold for fingers nor the attaching of a rope. The windows on either side were twenty feet away,

and, of course, gave on the occupied salon and smoking room where two dozen people were present. Below the line of windows all had iron grills closely wrought, a fancy protection against housebreakers. But most of all I saw the dust. It was thick over the outer and inner sill, an unbroken coating everywhere.

The smallest body or part of a body could hardly have gone through without smearing the dust somewhere. The window was ordinarily kept closed. Why, then, had it been opened tonight? I turned back to see Ben Collin directing the group of men. They were looking for fingerprints now, with their lenses and their brushes and the little

tins of powder-like flower-sifters. But there were few surfaces capable of holding prints, though they even went over the card tables folded against the wall. The photographing continued, and the room reeked terribly now. Two of them, at Ben Collins' order, took off the cover of the divan, folded it together like a bag, and carried it out along with the pillows. A man was scraping into the rug. He appeared to be grubbing after ashes or

something of the sort. Then they got round to the window, these pecking chickens making a barnyard of justice, and yelped childishly at the discovery of some prints on the glass. At length we were alone with the medical examiner. The sound of tramping in the hall had nearly ceased. Out there the agents were at work taking the names of all who left, so that you sensed the grind of great wheels in motion. Alone in the room of the murder, Ben Collin was leaning against the

door to the salon, whistling between his teeth, his eyes a blank. The medical examiner, silk hat stuck on the side of his head, was standing in the middle of the room, frowning and jabbing at his notebook with a recalcitrant pin. Before him was the white chalk outline stark against the red of rug and blood. In the silence, Ben Collin began to talk softly. Four walls of a room twenty feet by twenty. Walls of red leather. A red glass lamp on a table by a

divan. Half a dozen chairs in red plush. Three card tables against the wall. That is all, except a body and a disappearing murderer. "'I?' exclaimed the medical examiner, sticking the pen behind his ear. Slowly, as though to get the situation clear in his own mind, Ben Collin explained it. The medical examiner struck his notebook.

"'Oh, that's nonsense,' he said. His eyes wandered slowly round the square room. "'But it happened,' stated the detective, going over and opening the door to the hall. "'Francois!' he called. "'Stand where you were before.' From my position by the window I could see out into the hall, see the staircase and the edge of the clock on the landing below.

Francois appeared, poking his head around the corner. He was directly opposite me now, some five feet from the door. Ben Collin then opened the door into the deserted salon. There we were, he explained, at that lounge over there. We were watching the door all the time.

After Saligny entered, nobody else either entered or left. Nobody escaped by that door Francois was guarding. But there were nobody here when we came in. After an interval, the doctor pulled his hat down forcibly on his head. But it's ridiculous, ridiculous, he made gestures.

Hiding, then? Sir, where? Can you show me a place I might have overlooked? The doctor preened his whiskers and probed about. He started to say triumphantly the window, but when he had poked his head outside, he came back crestfallen.

Well, name of a devil, it's your job, not mine. If you're sure nobody was hiding. I am. Salony comes into the room, we learn, at eleven thirty. Almost immediately afterward he rings a bell.

Ben Collins scowled at the red cord hanging by the door into the hall. Or does he? "'Somebody rang it anyhow. "'At possibly fifteen minutes of twelve, "'the servant enters from the hall door carrying his tray.

"'Soligny lies there, in the chalk circle with his head cut off.' He stood motionless, with leveled finger. The murmur of departing people, the thromb of motors starting in the street, drifted up. "'All this time both doors have been carefully watched,

"'but the murderer has disappeared.' Ben Colin beat his knuckles against the sides of his head, made a wry face, and continued with a gesture. At any rate, why was the bell rung? That's the perplexing question.

Why was the bell rung? Well, why does anybody ring a bell? Asked the doctor with some exasperation. To summon a servant, apparently. And assuming, then, that he was ready for the servant to come in at any time?

Naturally. Whereupon the murderer, knowing that the servant may be in at any moment, proceeds to decapitate Salony. What does he want? A witness to his crime?

If Salony rang the bell, did the murderer go right ahead with his work anyhow? By the same token, did the murderer himself ring it, and proceed with the crime? It needn't have bothered the murderer, said the medical examiner, if he is as invisible as you claim. Either he made himself invisible and walked out one of two doors, or he made himself lighter than air and floated out the window.

Bell ringing is insaner than that. Either he was shut up in a cell with every door guarded, or else all you others ought to be. Ben Collin, his face a mass of wrinkles, was thoughtfully rubbing his cheek. He said suddenly, There is an alternative.

Well? asked the doctor. namely, that neither Salony nor the murderer rang the bell. You mean that the servant never heard the bell at all? No, I am sure that the servant is entirely innocent, and I am equally certain he did hear the bell.

I mean just what I say. The doctor bellowed, A third person? Another one who disappeared then? No, I mean that the bell might have been rung by somebody who wasn't in ze room at all.

The doctor was bubbling with anger, but he tried to show some calmness and yanking on his gloves. He stared at Ben Collin and replied in an even voice,

Your alternative, monsieur, is beyond the furthest limits of unreason. Personally, I prefer the mere impossible. You are absolutely sure that this detective,

François Dilsac, is trustworthy, and that his testimony is true? I would stake my life on it. and you swear equally to your own testimony? Yes. Without another word, the doctor made a

gesture of high tragedy and stalked out of the room. In a moment we could see him standing with Francois at the head of the stairs. They were both waving their arms and jabbering excitedly at each other, engrossed with gallic earnestness and debate. Ben Collin closed the door. The possibility of a secret entrance, he remarked, thumping his foot on the floor, is out of the question. As I told you, I have looked along the line of all the walls.

However, to satisfy the particular before I send an architect to look into it, we will see to the floor and the ceiling. I will have the rug up in here. In the meantime, you might go upstairs and locate the room immediately above this. We can go over that floor and do some sounding between us, but I am convinced of the result.' Slowly he shook his head. Every character, every event at cross-purposes.

Each event is brought about by precisely the wrong means, but too many of these wrong movements combined form a pattern that baffles us. I am inclined to believe that the thing is almost too consistently unnatural to be the work of a madman. I went out into the hall, leaving him motionless in the middle of the room.

The diminishing voices of Francois and the doctor echoed up the well of the staircase. An emptiness had settled on these chambers. The low light showed disarranged chairs at the end of the hall. One of the potted palms had been knocked over. A few cigarette butts lay on the marble floor with its strip of red carpet.

The proprietor was nowhere in evidence, but a surly scrub woman had appeared with mop and bucket. There was a clink of somebody gathering up glasses in the main salon, and cautious footfalls tiptoed round the smoking-room to the tune of a man whistling Hallelujah under his breath. The stairway of marble and bronze rail was dark as it curved to the next floor,

and I might have known it, for it led to regions where ordinary patrons were not allowed. It had a closed door at the top. Tentatively, I twisted the knob. The door was unlocked. Double bolts on the inside.

Finnelly had been taking no chances. I stood and studied the hallway. It was similar to the one below, except decorated with a defter hand. There were somber tapestries, subdued in gray and green with a gray carpet. It swam in a moonlight glow from a bronze Venetian lantern of pale glass. When you closed the door, it was so still that I suspected the walls were soundproof. Four doors, numbered like private dining rooms,

were in the side facing the staircase, and on the staircase side three more. The numbers on the doors emerged with a greenish shine from their dull background. No guard, no noise. Number three, it seemed, must be directly over the card room. One moved like a phantom in this atmosphere. When I turned the knob of that door it moved in an oiled lock, and the hinges were oiled and soundless, so that the movement of the door had the odd and dreamlike quality of an opening gulf.

Inside there was a skylight in the roof, and in the blue over the well of shadows you could see bright motionless stars. I saw, too, faint gleams from a perforated lamp, threading slow smoke against the weird moving rustle of the dark. You may know the suggestion of incense to the brain. It transfigures any environment. It is a creeping drug to invest locked doors with mysterious promise.

Its mists, the flowering entrance to dreams. light and heady in the nostrils, the mind, and then pungent in the heart, as it was now, stealing through the silent room with a scent of buried cities, of flowers, and fleshly shrines. I stood with a shudder at my heart, terrible and sweet. My grip on the chill doorknob was the only sense of reality, for the floor seemed to drop away in bottomless carpet. A voice in my brain

whispered, Ambergris, and another chanted in low refrain like a slow swinging bell, Ambergris for passion. My first conscious movement was to fumble for a light switch involuntarily in the wall towards the left. I groped and found nothing, with a sensation as of one groping near a well. Then I hesitated, standing still, when I heard from over in the darkness the sound of a low moan. It was not repeated, that moan in the dark.

I merely stood still, hand uplifted as against a blow. End of chapter six.