A Rival from the Grave Read online

  “Mademoiselle, in what condition are your hands?”

  “They are normal and uninjured,” she replied.

  “Bien! Triomphe! Now, let us see.”

  With a pair of surgical shears he cut away the bandages. I held my breath as he drew away the gauze, but I wondered as the lower layers were drawn apart and showed no stain of blood.

  The final layer was off. Zita Szekler’s hands lay on the counterpane, smooth, white, pink-tipped, without a mark, or scar, or blemish.

  “Merciful heavens!” I exclaimed. “This is a miracle, no less.

  “Here, I say, de Grandin, where are you going, to call Colonel Szekler?”

  “Not I,” he answered with a chuckle. “Do you call him, good Friend Trowbridge. Me, I go to find that cocksure-of-his-diagnosis Doctor Teach and make him pay his wager.

  “Morbleu, how I shall enjoy drinking him beneath the table!”

  The Red Knife of Hassan

  “MON DIEU, IS IT the—what do you call him?—pinch?” asked Jules de Grandin as the traffic policeman’s white-rubber mitten rose before us through the driving rain.

  “Askin’ your pardon. Sir, you’re a doctor, ain’t you?” The officer pointed to the green cross and caduceus of the medical association attached to my radiator.

  “Yes I’m Doctor Trowbridge—”

  “Well can you spare a moment to go out to th’ dredge?” the other interrupted. “One o’ th’ crew’s hurt bad, an’ while they’re waitin’ for th’ amblance it might help if—”

  “But certainly, assuredly; of course,” de Grandin answered for me. “Lead the way, mon brave, we follow.”

  The grimy, oil-soaked launch which acted as the harbor dredge’s tender was waiting at the pier, and within five minutes we were on the squat, ungainly craft which gnawed unsurfeited at the ever-shifting bottom of the bay. The injured man, an assistant in the fire room, was suffering intensely, for an unattached steel cable had swung against him as he crossed the deck, smashing the tibia and fibula of his left leg in a comminuted fracture.

  “Non, there is little we can do here,” said the Frenchman as we finished our examination. “We have no proper fracture box, nor any instruments for cutting through the skin in order to secure the splintered bone, but we can ease his pain. Will you prepare the hypo, good Friend Trowbridge? I would suggest two grains of morphine; he suffers most intensely, and a smaller dose would scarcely help him.”

  Buttoned to the chin in oilskins and swearing like a pirate, the ambulance surgeon came out in the launch as we completed our administration of the anodyne, and rough but willing hands placed the injured man in the boat which bumped its prow against the dredge’s side. Sheltered in the doorway of the engine room, we watched the great dredge at its work while we awaited the return trip of the launch. Like some voracious monster diving for its prey the great clamshell scoop plunged from the tip of the forty-foot boom into the rain-beaten waters of the bay, disappeared amid a ring of oily bubbles, then emerged with water streaming from between its iron teeth, gaped like a yawning hippopotamus, and dropped a ton or more of sand and silt and sediment into the waiting barge.

  “Yes, sir, four times a minute, regular as clockwork, she fishes up a mouthful for us,” the engineer informed us proudly. “At this rate we’ll have this stretch o’ channel all cleared out by—God a’mighty, what’s that?”

  Horribly reminiscent of an oyster impaled upon a fork it hung, feet gripped between the dredge’s iron fangs, flaccid arms dangling pendulously, the nude and decomposing body of a woman.

  “Easy, Jake, let her down easy!” cried the engineer to the man at the cable-drum. “Don’t spring the scoop—we don’t want ‘er buried in that muck.

  “Coming, Doctor?” he cast the question at us impersonally as he jerked the collar of his slicker up about his throat and dashed across the deck through the slanting sheets of winter rain.

  “But certainly, of course we come,” de Grandin answered as he followed close upon the other’s heels, clambered across the rail and let himself almost waist-deep into the ooze which filled the mud-scow’s hold. More cautiously, I followed; and as the cable man, with an art which was surprising, lowered the great iron shell, released the gripping metal teeth and let the body slide down gently in the mire, I bent beside the little Frenchman to examine the weird salvage.

  “Non, we can not see her here,” complained de Grandin irritably. “Lift her up, my friends, gently, carefully—so. Now, then, over to the deck, beneath the shelter of the engine-house. Lights, pour l’amour de Dieu, shine the light upon us, if you please!”

  A big reflector-lamp was quickly plugged into a light-terminal, and in its sun-bright glare we bent to our examination. There was an area of greenish-gray about the face and throat, extending through the pectoral region and especially marked at the axillæ, but very little swelling of either abdomen or mammæ. As I lifted one of the dead hands I saw the palmar skin was deeply etched with wrinkles and slightly sodden in appearance. When de Grandin turned the body over we saw an area of purplish stain upon the dorsal section, but the shoulder blades, the buttocks, backs of the thigh, calves and heels were anemic-white in startling contrast.

  “Drowned, of course?” the engineer asked jerkily with the layman’s weak attempt at nonchalance before the unmasked face of death.

  “No, non; by no means,” returned the Frenchman shortly. “Observe him, if you please, le fil de fer, the—how do you say him?—wire.” A slender, well manicured forefinger pointed to the slightly bloated throat just above the level of the larynx. I had to look a second time before I saw it, for the softened, sodden flesh had swollen up around it, but as his finger pointed steadily I saw, and as I realized the implication of the thing, went sick with shock. About the throat a length of picture-wire had been wound and rewound, its ends at last spliced tightly in a knot; so there could have been no slipping of the ligature.

  “Strangulation!” I exclaimed in horror.

  “Précisément; la garrotte, the work of the apaches, my friends, and very well and thoroughly they did it, too. Had it not been for the dredge she might have lain upon the bottom of the bay for months and no one been the wiser. Observe the coldness of the water has retarded putrefaction, and undoubtlessly she was weighed down, but the iron teeth broke off the weights. One might suppose that—”

  “What’s that on the left cheek?” I interrupted. “Would you say it was a birthmark, or—”

  The Frenchman drew a pocket lens from his waistcoat held it at varying distances from the dead girl’s face, and squinted through it critically. “Grand Dieu, a birthmark, a putrefactive stain? Non!” he cried excitedly. “Look, Friend Trowbridge, look and see for yourself. What is your opinion?”

  I took the magnifying-glass and focused it till the blister-marked and scuffing skin enlarged in texture underneath my gaze, and then I saw, rising up from the discolored epidermis like a coat-of-arms emblazoned on a banner, the outline of a scar shaped something like a crescent standing on end, not marked upon, but deeply pressed into the flesh of the left cheek.

  “U’m, no, if s not a natural mark,” I commented. “Looks almost like a second degree burn or—”

  “It is a second degree burn, by blue—a brand!” the little Frenchman broke in sharply. “And there is a line of blister round it, showing that it was made on living skin. Parbleu, I damn think we have work to do, Friend Trowbridge!

  “Call the tender, if you will, Monsieur,” he turned to the chief engineer. “We must notify the coroner, then see that an autopsy is made. This is a very evil business, mes amis, for that poor one was branded, strangled, stripped and thrown into the bay.”

  As we stepped into the launch which plied between the dredge and piers he added grimly: “Someone sits in the electric chair for this night’s business, my friend.”

  CORONER MARTIN, DETECTIVE SERGEANT Jeremiah Costello, Jules de Grandin and I faced each other in the coroner’s private office. “The necropsy bears out my diagnosis pe
rfectly, Messieurs,” the little Frenchman told us as he helped himself to another glass of brandy from Mr. Martin’s desk-cellarette. “There was no trace of water in the lungs, showing that death could not have come from drowning, and even though dissolution had advanced, fractures of the larynx and the rings of the trachea were obvious, showing that death had come from strangulation. Taking the temperature of the water into consideration, we may say with fair assurance that the state of putrefaction places her murder at about two weeks ago. Unfortunately the face is too much disfigured to help us with identification, but—”

  “How about that scar?” I interjected.

  “Précisément, how of it?” he rejoined. “Observe it if you will.” Unfastening a paper parcel he held out a little square of parchment-like substance stretched tightly on a wire hoop. “I took the liberty of clipping away the scarified skin and impregnating it with formaldehyde,” he explained. “The scar which was so indistinct when viewed upon her face may easily be studied now. What do you make of it, Friend Trowbridge?”

  I took the little drumhead of skin and held it underneath the light. The mark was not a crescent, as I had at first supposed, but rather a silhouette of a hiltless dagger with an exaggeratedly curved blade. “A knife?” I hazarded.

  “Précisément, and that suggests—”

  “You mean it might have been a sort of ritual murder?”

  “It looks that way, my friend—”

  “Sure,” Costello broke in, “I’ve heard about them things—ran into one of ’em, once, meself. A dago case. This here now felly’d belonged to one o’ them secret societies, an’ tried to take a powder on ’em, or sumpin, an’ they give ‘im th’ sforza, I think they called it; th’ death o’ th’ seventy cuts. Doctor de Grandin, sor, he were more like a piece o’ hamburger steak than anything human when they’d finished wid ‘im. Are ye afther thinkin’ this pore dame wuz mixed up in sumpin like that?”

  “Something like that,” the Frenchman echoed; then:

  “Will you consult the files of the Missing Persons Bureau, Sergeant, and ascertain if any young woman approximately the size of this one was reported missing in the last month? That may help us to identify her.”

  But the check-up proved useless. No record of a girl of five feet three, weighing a hundred and ten pounds, was in the missing persons file at headquarters, nor did communication with New York, Newark and Jersey City help us. Mr. Martin, as the keeper of the city mortuary, took charge of the body and buried it in an unmarked grave in the public plot of Rosevale Cemetery, the only record of its disposition being: “Mary Doe, Plot D, Sec. 54, West Range 1458.”

  Costello went about his duties of pursuing evil-doers with his customary Celtic efficiency, and dismissed the incident from his mind. I reverted to my practise, and thought but seldom of the poor maimed body; but Jules de Grandin did not forget. Several times at dinner I caught him staring sightlessly before him, neglecting the rare tidbits which Nora McGinnis, my highly gifted cook, prepared especially for him. “What’s the matter, old chap?” I asked him one night when he seemed especially distrait.

  He shook his head as though to clear his thoughts, and: “Ah bah,” he answered in annoyance, “there is a black dog running through my brain. That Mademoiselle l’Inconnue, the poor nameless one whom we saw fished up from the bay, her blood calls out to me for vengeance.”

  IT WAS A MERRY, though decidedly exclusive party Colonel Hilliston entertained at his big house down by Raritan. Why de Grandin had been so set on coming I had no idea, but from the moment he learned that Arbuthnot Hilliston, world traveler, lecturer and explorer, had returned from the Near East he had given me no peace until I renewed old acquaintance with the colonel, and obtained our invitation as a consequence. A hundred years and more ago some ambitious shipmaster had built this house, and built it solidly as the ships he sailed. Generations had gone by, the old blood thinned and finally trickled out; then Hilliston, weary of globe-trotting, had purchased the old place, rebuilt and modernized it, then with the restlessness of the born traveler had used it more as pied-à-terre than home, coming back to it only in the intervals between five-thousand-mile-long jaunts to write his books, prepare his lectures and foregather with his friends a little while.

  “You’ve known Colonel Hilliston long, Doctor Trowbridge?” asked my dinner partner, a tall and more than ordinarily interesting brunette whose name, as I had caught it in the rite of presentation, was Margaret Ditmas.

  “Not very, I’m afraid,” I answered. “I knew his parents better. They were patients of mine when they lived in Harrisonville, and I attended Arbuthnot for the customary children’s ailments, mumps and measles, chickenpox and whooping-cough, you know, but since he’s been grown up and famous—”

  “Did he ever strike you as a nervous child, or one likely to develop nerves?” she interrupted, and her large and rather expressionless eyes were unveiled suddenly by an odd raising of their upper lids.

  “No-o, I can’t say he did,” I told her. “Just a normal boy, I’d say, rather fond of finding out the reason why for everything he saw, but scarcely nervous. Why do you ask?”

  “Colonel Hilliston’s afraid of something—terrified.”

  I glanced along the table with its priceless banquet cloth of Philippine embroidery, its gleaming silver and big, flat bouquets of winter roses, till I saw our host’s face in the zone of light which streamed from two tall candelabra. Plentiful dark hair, brushed sleekly back and growing low about the ears, framed a rather lean and handsome face, bronzed as a sailor’s and with fine sun-lines about the eyes, a narrow, black mustache and strong, white teeth. A forceful, energetic face, this long-chinned countenance, hardly the face of a man who could be frightened, much less terrified. “What makes you think that Arbuthnot’s developed nerves?” I asked.

  “You see those doors?” she queried, nodding toward the triple French windows leading to the brick-paved terrace which skirted the seaward side of the house.

  “Well?” I nodded, smiling.

  “Their panes are set in wood, aren’t they?”

  “Apparently; but why—”

  “They are, but every wooden setting has a steel bar reinforcing it, and the glass is ‘burglar glass’—reinforced with wire, you know. So is every window in the house, and the doors and windows are all secured with combination locks and chains while the outside doors are sheathed in steel. Besides, there’s something in his manner; he’s jumpy, seems almost listening for something, and acts as though he were about to turn round and look behind him every moment or so.”

  She was so serious and secretive about it all that I smiled despite myself. “And does he turn round?” I asked.

  “No. I think he’s like that man in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

  Like one that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round, walks on,

  And turns no more his head,

  Because he knows a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread.

  “My dear young lady!” I protested, but Jules de Grandin’s voice cut through my words as he spoke jocularly to our host:

  “And did you scale the Mount of Evil in Syria, Monsieur le Colonel?” he inquired. “The mountain where the ancient bad one dwelt, and sent his minions out to harry those who would not pay him tribute? You know, the Sheik Al-je-bal they called him in the ancient days, and he was head of the haschisch-eaters who for two long centuries terrified the world—”

  Something flickered momentarily in our host’s deep-set eyes, something which if it were not fear seemed very like it to me as I watched. “Nonsense!” he broke in almost roughly. “That’s all damned poppycock, de Grandin. Those Assassins were just a lot of ordinary mountain bandits, such as Europe and the Near Fast swarmed with in those days. All this talk of their mysterious power is legendary, just as half the stories of Robin Hood—or Al Capone, for that matter—are the purest fiction.” He gazed around the ta
ble for a moment, then nodded to the butler, a small, dark man with olive skin and big, Semitic features.

  “Coffee is served in the drawing-room, please,” announced this functionary, deftly bringing the meal to a close.

  We trooped into the big parlor, and I caught my breath in admiration of the place. The beauty of that room was a sort of mad, irrational loveliness, a kind of orderly arrangement of discordant elements which resulted in perfected harmony. A buhl table out of India, Fifteenth Century Italian chairs, Flemish oak, ponderous as forged iron and beautiful as carven marble, a Chinese cabinet which must have been worth its weight in solid gold, pottery, shawls and hangings from the near and farther East, carved jade, rugs so thick and soft it seemed as though the floor were strewn with desert sand—a very art-museum of a place it was. Thick Turkish coffee and great squares of halwa were handed round by the stoop-shouldered butler, and presently long cigarettes, almost the size of a cigar, were lighted, and I caught the faint, elusive perfume of ambergris as the smoke-wreaths spiraled upward in the dim light sifting through the perforated bronze shades of the lamps.

  “Ambergris—for passion,” quoted Margaret Ditmas as she lolled beside me on the divan with a cat-like grace of utter relaxation. “You’ve heard the Easterners believe that, Doctor Trowbridge?”

  I turned and studied her. Her hair was very black and glossy, and she wore it smoothly parted and drawn low above her ears. Her eyes were large, dark, queerly unmoving under thin-arched brows. Her mouth was wide, thin-lipped, very red, and her teeth were small and white. Beneath the hem of her black-satin gown there showed an inch or so of gray-silk stocking, and underneath the meshes of the silk there shone a gleam of platinum where a thread-thin anklet encircled her slim leg. I sensed a hard shell over her almost feline suppleness, as though she wore defensive armor against the world. “Where does she fit in?” I asked myself. “And why should she be so attentive to a bald, bewhiskered medical practitioner when there are young and handsome men around? Our host, for instance—”