The Dark Angel Page 13

  “As our party alighted a double squad of musicians stationed at the lower end of the files of troops tossed their trumpets upward with a triple flourish and began sounding a salute and the soldiers came to present arms. I could see the tiny drops of misty rain shining like gouts of sweat on the steel helmets and bayonet blades as we advanced between the rows of infantry. A chill of dread ran up my spine as I glanced at the soldiers facing us on each side. Their faces were grave and stern, their eyes harder than the bayonets on their rifles. Cold, implacable hatred, pitiless as death’s own self, was in every countenance. This was a spy, a secret enemy of France, who marched to his death between their perfectly aligned ranks. The wet and chilly morning air seemed surcharged with an emanation of concentrated hate and ruthlessness.

  “When the prisoner was almost at the stake he suddenly drew back against the handcuffs binding him to his guard and said something over his shoulder to the colonel marching directly behind him. The officer first shook his head, then consulted with a major walking at his left, finally nodded shortly. ‘Monsieur le Capitaine,’ a dapper little sub-lieutenant saluted me, ‘the prisoner asks to speak with you. It is irregular, but the colonel has granted permission. However, you may talk with him only in the presence of a French officer’—he looked coldly at me, as though suspecting I were in some way implicated in the spy’s plots—‘you understand that, of course?’

  “‘I have no wish to talk with him—’ I began, but Fouchet interrupted.

  “‘Do so, my friend,’ he urged. ‘Who knows, he may have news of Madame Sonia, your morte amoureuse. Come.

  “‘I will act as witness to the conversation and stand surety for Captain Tanis,’ he added to the subaltern with frigid courtesy.

  “They exchanged polite salutes and decidedly impolite glares, and Fouchet and I advanced to where the prisoner and the priest stood between the guarding gendarmes.

  “Even if I had known nothing of him—if I’d merely passed him casually on the boulevard—Konstantin would have repelled me. He was taller than the average and thin with a thinness that was something more than the sign of malnutrition; this skeletal gauntness seemed to have a distinct implication of evil. His hat had been removed, but from neck to feet he was arrayed in unrelieved black, a black shirt bound round the collar with a black cravat, a black serge suit of good cut and material, shoes of dull-black leather, even gloves of black kid on his long, thin hands. He had a sardonic face, long, smooth-shaven, its complexion an unhealthy yellowish olive. His eyes were black as carbon, and as lacking in luster, overhung by arched brows of intense, dead black, like his hair, which was parted in the middle and brushed sharply back from the temples, leaving a point at the center of the forehead. This inverted triangle led down to a long, hooked nose, and that to a long, sharp chin. Between the two there ran a wide mouth with thin, cruel lips of unnatural, brilliant red, looking, against the sallow face, as though they had been freshly rouged. An evil face it was, evil with a fathomless understanding of sin and passion, and pitiless as the visage of a predatory beast.

  “He smiled briefly, almost imperceptibly, as I approached. ‘Captain Donald Tanis, is it not?” he asked in a low, mocking voice.

  “I bowed without replying.

  “‘Monsieur le Capitaine,’ he proceeded, ‘I have sent for you because I, of all the people in the world, can give you a word of comfort—and my time for disinterested philanthropy grows short. A little while ago I had the honor to take to wife a young lady in whom you had been deeply interested. Indeed I think we might make bold to say you were in love with her, nicht wahr?’

  “As I still returned no answer he opened that cavernous, red-lipped mouth of his and gave a low, almost soundless chuckle, repulsive as the grinning of a skull.

  “‘Jawohl,’ he continued, ‘let us waive the tender confession. Whatever your sentiments were toward her, there was no doubt of hers toward you. She married me, but it was you she loved. The marriage was her father’s doing. He was in my debt, and I pressed him for my pound of flesh, only in this instance it was a hundred pounds or so of flesh—his daughter’s. He’d acted as an agent of mine at the Censure Militaire until he’d worn out his usefulness, so I threatened to denounce him unless he would arrange a marriage for me with the charming Sonia. Having gotten what I wanted, I had no further use for him. The sad-eyed old fool would have been a wet blanket on the ardor of my honeymoon. I told him to get out—gave him his choice between disposing of himself or facing a French firing-squad.

  “‘It seems now that he chose to be revenged on me at the same time he gave himself the happy dispatch. Dear, dear, who would have thought the sniveling old dotard would have had the spirit?

  “‘But we digress and the gentlemen grow impatient,’ he nodded toward the file of troops. ‘We Russians have a saying that the husband who fails to beat his wife is lacking in outward manifestation of affection.’ He chuckled soundlessly again. ‘I do not think my bride had cause for such complaint.

  “‘What would you have given,’ he asked in a low, mocking whisper, ‘to have stood in my place that night three weeks ago? To have torn the clothing off her shuddering body, to have cooled her fevered blushes with your kisses, then melted her maidenly coolness with burning lips—to have strained her trembling form within your arms, then, in the moment of surrender, to have thrust her from you, beaten her down, hurled her to the floor and ground her underfoot till she crept suppliant to you on bare and bleeding knees, holding up her bruised and bleeding face to your blows or your caresses, as you chose to give them—utterly submissive, wholly, unconditionally yours, to do with as you wished?’

  “He paused again and I could see little runnels of sweat trickling down his high, narrow brow as he shook with passion at the picture his words had evoked.

  “‘Nu,’ he laughed shortly. ‘I fear my love became too violent at last. The fish in the pan has no fear of strangling in the air. I can tell you this without fear of increasing my penalty. Sonia’s death certificate declares she died of a broken neck resulting from a fall downstairs. Bah! She died because I beat her! I beat her to death, do you hear, my fish-blooded American, my chaste, chivalrous worshiper of women, and as she died beneath my blows, she called on you to come and save her!

  “‘You thought she stopped her letters because she had grown tired? Bah, again. She did it out of pride, because she thought that you no longer cared. At my command her father intercepted the letters you sent to her Paris home—I read them all, even your halting, trembling proposal, which she never saw or even suspected. It was amusing, I assure you.

  “‘You’ve come to see me die, hein? Then have your fill of seeing it. I saw Sonia die; heard her call for help to the lover who never came, saw her lower her pride to call out to the man she thought had jilted her as I rained blow on blow upon her!’

  “Abruptly his manner changed, he was the suave and smooth-spoken gentleman once more. ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Hauptmann!’ he bid me with a mocking bow.

  “‘I await your pleasure, Messieurs,’ he announced, turning to the gendarmes.

  “A detail of twelve soldiers under the command of a lieutenant with a drawn sword detached itself from the nearer company of infantry, executed a left wheel and came to halt about five meters away, their rifles at the order, the bayonets removed. The colonel stepped forward and read a summary of the death sentence, and as we drew back the gendarmes unlatched their handcuffs and bound the prisoner with his back against the post with a length of new, white rope. A handkerchief was bound about his eyes and the gendarmes stepped back quickly.

  “‘Garde à vous!’ the firing-party commander’s voice rang out.

  “‘Adieu pour ce monde, mon Lieutenant, do not forget the coup de grâce!’ Konstantin called airily.

  “The lieutenant raised his sword and swung it downward quickly; a volley rang out from the platoon of riflemen.

  “The transformation in the prisoner was instant and horrible. He collapsed, his body sagging weak
ly at the knees, as a filled sack collapses when its contents are let out through a cut, then sprawled full length face-downward on the ground, for the bullets had cut the rope restraining him. But on the turf the body writhed and contorted like a snake seared with fire, and from the widely opened mouth there came a spate of blood and gurgling, strangling cries mingled with half-articulate curses.

  “A corporal stepped forward from the firing-party, his heavy automatic in his hand. He halted momentarily before the widening pool of blood about the writhing body, then bent over, thrust the muzzle of his weapon into the long black hair which, disordered by his death agonies, was falling about Konstantin’s ears, and pulled the trigger. A dull report, like the popping of a champagne cork, sounded, and the twisting thing upon the ground gave one convulsive shudder, then lay still.

  “‘This is the body of Alexis Konstantin, a spy, duly executed in pursuance of the sentence of death pronounced by the military court. Does anyone lay claim to it?’ announced the commandant in a steady voice. No answer came, though we waited what seemed like an hour to me.

  “‘À vos rangs!’ Marching in quick time, the execution party filed past the prostrate body on the blood-stained turf and rejoined its company, and at a second command the two units of infantry formed columns of fours and marched from the field, the trumpet sounding at their head.

  “The black-smocked men dragged the coffin from the black-curtained van, dumped the mangled body unceremoniously into it, and the driver whipped his horses into a trot toward the cemetery of Vincennes where executed spies and traitors were interred in unmarked graves.

  “‘A queer one, that,’ an officer of the party which had accompanied the prisoner to execution told us as we walked toward our waiting cars. ‘When we left the Santé he was almost numb with fright, but when I told him that the coup de grâce—the mercy shot—was always given on occasions of this kind, he seemed to forget his fears and laughed and joked with us and with his warders till the very minute when we reached the field. Tiens, he seemed to have a premonition that the volley would not at once prove fatal and that he must suffer till the mercy shot was given. Do you recall how he reminded the platoon commander to remember the shot before the order to fire was given? Poor devil!’”

  “Ah?” said Jules de Grandin. “A-ah? Do you report that conversation accurately, my friend?”

  “Of course I do,” young Tanis answered. “It’s stamped as firmly on my mind as if it happened yesterday. One doesn’t forget such things, sir.”

  “Précisément, Monsieur,” de Grandin agreed with a thoughtful nod. “I did but ask for verification. This may have some bearing on that which may develop later, though I hope not. What next, if you please?”

  Young Tanis shook his head as though to clear an unhappy memory from his mind. “Just one thought kept dinning in my brain,” he continued. “‘Sonia is dead—Sonia is dead!’ a jeering voice seemed repeating endlessly in my ear. ‘She called on you for help and you failed her!’ By the time we arrived at the censor’s bureau I was half mad; by luncheon I had formed a resolve. I would visit Saint Sébastien that night and take farewell of my dead sweetheart—she whom Fouchet had called my morte amoureuse.

  “The light mist of the morning had ripened into a steady, streaming downpour by dark; by half-past eleven, when my fiacre let me down at Saint Sébastien, the wind was blowing half a gale and the rain drops stung like whip-lashes as they beat into my face beneath the brim of my field hat. I turned my raincoat collar up as far as it would go and splashed and waded through the puddles to the pentice of the tiny chapel beside the cemetery entrance. A light burned feebly in the intendant’s cabin, and as the old fellow came shuffling to open the door in answer to my furious knocks, a cloud of super-heated, almost fetid air burst into my face. There must have been a one per cent concentration of carbon monoxide in the room, for every opening was tightly plugged and a charcoal brazier was going full blast.

  “He blinked stupidly at me a moment; then: ‘M’sieur l’Americain?’ he asked doubtfully, looking at my soaking hat and slicker for confirmation of his guess. ‘M’sieur has no doubt lost his way, n’est-ce-pas? This is the cemetery of Saint Sébastien—’

  “‘Monsieur l’Americain has not lost his way, and he is perfectly aware this is the cemetery of Saint Sébastien,’ I assured him. Without waiting for the invitation I knew he would not give, I pushed by him into the stuffy little cabin and kicked the door shut. ‘Would the estimable fossoyeur care to earn a considerable sum of money—five hundred—a thousand francs—perhaps?’ I asked.

  “‘Sacré Dieu, he is crazy, this one,’ the old man muttered. ‘Mad he is, like all the Yankees, and drunk in the bargain. Help me, blessed Mother!’

  “I took him by the elbow, for he was edging slowly toward the door, and shook a bundle of hundred-franc notes before his staring eyes. ‘Five of these now, five more when you have fulfilled your mission, and not a word to anyone!’ I promised.

  “His little shoe-button eyes shone with speculative avarice. ‘M’sieur desires that I help him kill some one?’ he ventured. ‘Is it perhaps that M’sieur has outside the body of one whom he would have secretly interred?’

  “‘Nothing as bad as that,’ I answered, laughing in spite of myself, then stated my desires baldly. ‘Will you do it, at once?’ I finished.

  “‘For fifteen hundred francs, perhaps—’ he began, but I shut him off.

  “‘A thousand or nothing,’ I told him.

  “‘Mille tonnerres, M’sieur, you have no heart,’ he assured me. ‘A poor man can scarcely live these days, and the risk I run is great. However,’ he added hastily as I folded the bills and prepared to thrust them back into my pocket, ‘however, one consents. There is nothing else to do.’ He slouched off to a corner of the hut and picked up a rusty spade and mattock. ‘Come, let us go,’ he growled, dropping a folded burlap sack across his shoulders.

  “The rain, wind-driven between the leafless branches of the poplar trees, beat dismally down upon the age-stained marble tombs and the rough, unsodded mounds of the ten-year concessions. Huddled by the farther wall of the cemetery, beneath their rows of ghastly white wooden signboards, the five- and three-year concessions seemed to cower from the storm. These were the graves of the poorer dead, one step above the tenants of the Potter’s Field. The rich, who owned their tombs or graves in perpetuity, slept their last long sleep undisturbed; next came the rows of ten-year concessionaires, whose relatives had bought them the right to lie in moderately deep graves for a decade, after which their bones would be exhumed and deposited in a common charnel-house, all trace of their identity lost. The five-year concessionnaires’ graves were scarcely deeper than the height of the coffins they enclosed, and their repose was limited to half a decade, while the three-year concessions, placed nearest the cemetery wall, were little more than mounds of sodden earth heaped over coffins sunk scarce a foot underground, destined to be broken down and emptied in thirty-six months. The sexton led the way to one of these and began shoveling off the earth with his spade.

  “His tool struck an obstruction with a thud and in a moment he was wrenching at the coffin top with the flat end of his mattock.

  “I took the candle-lantern he had brought and flashed its feeble light into the coffin. Sonia lay before me, rigid as though petrified, her hands tight-clenched, the nails digging into the soft flesh of her palms, little streams of dried blood running from each self-inflicted wound. Her eyes were closed—thank heaven!—her mouth a little open, and on her lips there lay a double line of bloody froth.

  “‘Grand Dieu!’ the sexton cried as he looked past me into the violated coffin. ‘Come away, quickly, M’sieur; it is a vampire that we see! Behold the life-like countenance, the opened mouth all bloody from the devil’s breakfast, the hands all wet with human blood! Come, I will strike it to the heart with my pickax and sever its unhallowed head with my spade, then we shall fill the grave again and go away all quickly. O, Sainte Vierge, have pity on us!
See, M’sieur, I do begin!’ He laid the spur-end of his mattock against Sonia’s left breast, and I could see the flimsy crêpe night robe she wore by way of shroud and the soft flesh beneath dimple under the iron’s weight.

  “‘Stop it, you fool!’ I bellowed, snatching his pickax and bending forward. ‘You shan’t—’ Some impulse prompted me to rearrange the shroud where the muddy mattock had soiled it, and as my hand came into contact with the beloved body I started. The flesh was warm.

  “I thrust the doddering old sexton back with a tremendous shove and he landed sitting in a pool of mud and water and squatted there, mouthing bleating admonitions to me to come away.

  “Sinking to my knees beside the grave I put my hand against her breast, then laid a finger on her throat beneath the angle of the jaw, as they’d taught us in first-aid class. There was no doubt of it. Faint as the fluttering of a fledgling thrust prematurely from its nest and almost perished with exposure, but still perceptible, a feeble pulse was beating in her breast and throat.

  “A moment later I had snatched my raincoat off, wrapped it about her, and, flinging a handful of banknotes at the screaming sexton, I clasped her flaccid body in my arms, sloshed through the mud to the cemetery wall and vaulted over it.

  “I found myself in a sort of alley flanked on both sides by stables, a pale light burning at its farther end. Toward this I made, bending almost double against the driving rain in order to shield my precious burden from the storm and to present the poorest target possible if the sexton should procure a gun and take a pot-shot at me.

  “It seemed as though I waded through the rain for hours, though actually I don’t suppose I walked for more than twenty minutes before a prowling taxi hailed me. I jumped into the vehicle and told the man to drive to my quarters as fast as his old rattletrap would go, and while we skidded through the sodden streets I propped Sonia up against the cushions and wrapped my blouse about her feet while I held her hands in mine, chafing them and breathing on them.