The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 2

  Only Jules de Grandin Stands in Satan’s Way!

  Robert E. Weinberg

  Chicago, Illinois, USA

  and

  George A. Vanderburgh

  Lake Eugenia, Ontario, Canada

  23 September 2016

  The Isle of Missing Ships

  1

  THE Mevrouw, SUMATRA-BOUND OUT of Amsterdam, had dropped the low Holland coast an hour behind that day in 1925, when I recognized a familiar figure among the miscellany of Dutch colonials. The little man with the erect, military carriage, trimly waxed mustache and direct, challenging blue eyes was as conspicuous amid the throng of over-fleshed planters, traders and petty administrators as a fleur-de-lis growing in the midst of a cabbage patch.

  “For the Lord’s sake, de Grandin! What are you doing here?” I demanded, seizing him by the hand. “I thought you’d gone back to your microscopes and test tubes when you cleared up the Broussac mystery.”

  He grinned at me like a blond brother of Mephistopheles as he linked his arm in mine and caught step with me. “Eh bien,” he agreed with a nod, “so did I; but those inconsiderate Messieurs Lloyd would not have it so. They must needs send me an urgent message to investigate a suspicion they have at the other end of the earth.

  “I did not desire to go. The summer is come and the blackbirds are singing in the trees at St. Cloud. Also, I have much work to do; but they tell me: ‘You shall name your own price and no questions shall be asked,’ and, hélas, the franc is very low on the exchange these days.

  “I tell them, ‘Ten pounds sterling for each day of my travels and all expenses.’ They agree. Voilà. I am here.”

  I looked at him in amazement. “Lloyds? Ten pounds sterling a day?” I echoed. “What in the world—?”

  “La, la!” he exclaimed. “It is a long story, Friend Trowbridge, and most like a foolish one in the bargain, but, at any rate, the English money is sound. Listen”—he sank his voice to a confidential whisper—“you know those Messieurs Lloyd, hein? They will insure against anything from the result of one of your American political elections to the loss of a ship in the sea. That last business of theirs is also my business, for the time.

  “Of late the English insurers have had many claims to pay—claims on ships which should have been good risks. There was the Dutch Indiaman Van Damm, a sound little iron ship of twelve thousand tons displacement. She sail out of Rotterdam for Sumatra, and start home heavy-laden with spices and silks, also with a king’s ransom in pearls safely locked in her strong box. Where is she now?” He spread his hands and shrugged expressively. “No one knows. She was never heard of more, and the Lloyds had to make good her value to her owners.

  “There was the French steamer l’Orient, also dissolved into air, and the British merchantman Nightingale, and six other sound ships gone—all gone, with none to say whither, and the estimable Messieurs Lloyd to pay insurance. All within one single year. Parbleu, it is too much! The English company pays its losses like a true sportsman, but it also begins to sniff the aroma of the dead fish. They would have me, Jules de Grandin, investigate this business of the monkey and tell them where the missing ships are gone.

  “It may be for a year that I search; it may be for only a month, or, perhaps, I spend the time till my hair is as bald as yours, Friend Trowbridge, before I can report. No matter; I receive my ten pounds each day and all incidental expenses. Say now, are not those Messieurs Lloyd gambling more recklessly this time than ever before in their long career?”

  “I think they are,” I agreed.

  “But,” he replied with one of his elfish grins, “remember, Trowbridge, my friend, those Messieurs Lloyd were never known to lose money permanently on any transaction. Morbleu! Jules de Grandin, as the Americans say, you entertain the hatred for yourself!”

  The Mevrouw churned and wallowed her broad-beamed way through the cool European ocean, into the summer seas, finally out upon the tropical waters of Polynesia. For five nights the smalt-blue heavens were ablaze with stars; on the sixth evening the air thickened at sunset. By ten o’clock the ship might have been draped in a pall of black velvet as a teapot is swathed in a cozy, so impenetrable was the darkness. Objects a dozen feet from the porthole lights were all but indistinguishable, at twenty feet they were invisible, and, save for the occasional phosphorescent glow of some tumbling sea denizen, the ocean itself was only an undefined part of the surrounding blackness.

  “Eh, but I do not like this,” de Grandin muttered as he lighted a rank Sumatra cigar from the ship steward’s store and puffed vigorously to set the fire going: “this darkness, it is a time for evil doings, Friend Trowbridge.”

  He turned to a ship’s officer who strode past us toward the bridge. “Is it that we shall have a storm, Monsieur?” he asked. “Does the darkness portend a typhoon?”

  “No,” returned the Dutchman. “Id iss folcanic dust. Some of dose folcano mountains are in eruption again and scatter steam and ash over a hundred miles. Tomorrow, perhaps, or de nex’ day, ve are out of id an’ into de zunzhine again.”

  “Ah,” de Grandin bowed acknowledgment of the information, “and does this volcanic darkness frequently come at this latitude and longitude, Monsieur?”

  “Ja,” the other answered, “dese vaters are almost alvays cofered; de chimneys of hell poke up through de ocean hereabouts, Mijnheer.”

  “Cordieu!” de Grandin swore softly to himself. “I think he has spoken truth, Friend Trowbridge. Now if—Grand Dieu, see! What is that?”

  Some distance off our port bow a brand of yellow fire burned a parabola against the black sky, burst into a shower of sparks high above the horizon and flung a constellation of colored fireballs into the air. A second flame followed the first, and a third winged upward in the wake of the second. “Rockets,” de Grandin announced. “A ship is in distress over there, it would seem.”

  Bells clanged and jangled as the engine room telegraph sent orders from the bridge; there was a clanking of machinery as the screws churned in opposite directions and the steering mechanism brought the ship’s head about toward the distress signals.

  “I think we had best be prepared, my friend,” de Grandin whispered as he reached upward to the rack above us and detached two kapok swimming jackets from their straps. “Come, slip this over your shoulders, and if you have anything in your cabin you would care to save, get it at once,” he advised.

  “You’re crazy, man,” I protested, pushing the life preserver away. “We aren’t in any danger. Those lights were at least five miles away, and even if that other ship is fast on a reef our skipper would hear the breakers long before we were near enough to run aground.”

  “Nom d’un nom!” the little Frenchman swore in vexation. “Friend Trowbridge, you are one great zany. Have you no eyes in that so empty head of yours? Did you not observe how those rockets went up?”

  “How they went up?” I repeated. “Of course I did; they were fired from the deck—perhaps the bridge—of some ship about five miles away.”

  “So?” he replied in a sarcastic whisper. “Five miles, you say? And you, a physician, do not know that the human eye sees only about five miles over a plane surface? How, then, if the distressed ship is five miles distant, could those flares have appeared to rise from a greater height than our own deck? Had they really a masthead, at that distance—they should have appeared to rise across the horizon. As it was, they first became visible at a considerable height.”

  “Nonsense,” I rejoined; “whoever would be setting off rockets in midair in this part of the world?”

  “Who, indeed?” he answered, gently forcing the swimming coat on me. “That question, mon ami, is precisely what those Messieurs Lloyd are paying me ten pounds a day to answer. Hark!”

  Distinctly, directly in our path, sounded the muttering roar of waves breaking against rocks.

  Clang! The ship’s telegraph shrieked the order to reverse, to put about, to the engine room from the bridge.

  Wheels and chain
s rattled, voices shouted hoarse orders through the dark, and the ship shivered from stem to stern as the engine struggled hysterically to break our course toward destruction.

  Too late! Like a toy boat caught in a sudden wind squall, we lunged forward, gathering speed with each foot we traveled. There was a rending crash like all the crockery in the world being smashed at once, de Grandin and I fell headlong to the deck and shot along the smooth boards like a couple of ball players sliding for second base, and the stout little Mevrouw listed suddenly to port, sending us banging against the deck rail.

  “Quick, quick, my friend!” de Grandin shouted. “Over the side and swim for it. I may be wrong, prie-Dieu I am, but I fear there will be devil’s work here anon. Come!” He lifted himself to his feet, balanced on the rail a moment, then slipped into the purple water that swirled past the doomed ship’s side a scant seven feet below us.

  I followed, striking out easily toward the quiet water ahead, the kapok jacket keeping me afloat and the rushing water carrying me forward rapidly.

  “By George, old fellow, you’ve been right this far,” I congratulated my companion, but he shut me off with a sharp hiss.

  “Still, you fool,” he admonished savagely. “Keep your silly tongue quiet and kick with your feet. Kick, kick, I tell you! Make as great commotion in the water as possible—nom de Dieu! We are lost!”

  Faintly luminous with the phosphorescence of tropical sea water, something seeming as large as a submarine boat shot upward from the depths below, headed as straight for my flailing legs as a sharpshooter’s bullet for its target.

  De Grandin grasped my shoulder and heaved me over in a clumsy back somersault, and at the same time thrust himself as deeply into the water as his swimming coat would permit. For a moment his fiery silhouette mingled with that of the great fish and he seemed striving to embrace the monster, then the larger form sank slowly away, while the little Frenchman rose puffing to the surface.

  “Mordieu!” he commented, blowing the water from his mouth, “that was a near escape, my friend. One little second more and he would have had your leg in his belly. Lucky for us, I knew the pearl divers’ trick of slittin’ those fellows’ gills with a knife, and luckier still I thought to bring along a knife to slit him with.”

  “What was it?” I asked, still bewildered by the performance I had just witnessed. “It looked big enough to be a whale.”

  He shook his head to clear the water from his eyes as he replied. “It was our friend, Monsieur le Requin—the shark. He is always hungry, that one, and such morsels as you would be a choice titbit for his table, my friend.”

  “A shark!” I answered incredulously. “But it couldn’t have been a shark, de Grandin, they have to turn on their backs to bite, and that thing came straight at me.”

  “Ah, bah!” he shot back disgustedly. “What old wives’ tale is that you quote? Le requin is no more compelled to take his food upside down than you are. I tell you, he would have swallowed your leg up to the elbow if I had not cut his sinful gizzard in two!”

  “Good Lord!” I began splashing furiously. “Then we’re apt to be devoured any moment!”

  “Possibly,” he returned calmly, “but not probably. If land is not too far away that fellow’s brethren will be too busy eating him to pay attention to such small fry as us. Grace à Dieu, I think I feel the good land beneath our feet even now.”

  It was true. We were standing armpit-deep on a sloping, sandy beach with the long, gentle swell of the ocean kindly pushing us toward the shore. A dozen steps and we were safely beyond the tide-line, lying face down upon the warm sands and gulping down great mouthfuls of the heavy, sea-scented air. What de Grandin did there in the dark I do not know, but for my part I offered up such unspoken prayers of devout thanksgiving as I had never breathed before.

  My devotions were cut short by a sputtering mixture of French profanity.

  “What’s up?” I demanded, then fell silent as de Grandin’s hand closed on my wrist like a tightened tourniquet.

  “Hark, my friend,” he commanded. “Look across the water to the ship we left and say whether or no I was wise when I brought us away.”

  Out across the quiet lagoon inside the reef the form of the stranded Mevrouw loomed a half shade darker than the night, her lights, still burning, casting a fitful glow upon the crashing water at the reef and the quiet water beyond. Two, three, four, half a dozen shades gathered alongside her; dark figures, like ants swarming over the carcass of a dead rat, appeared against her lights a moment, and the stabbing flame of a pistol was followed a moment later by the reports of the shots wafted to us across the lagoon. Shouts, cries of terror, screams of women in abject fright followed one another in quick succession for a time, then silence, more ominous than any noise, settled over the water.

  Half an hour, perhaps, de Grandin and I stood tense-muscled on the beach, staring toward the ship, waiting expectantly for some sign of renewed life. One by one her porthole lights blinked out; at last she lay in utter darkness.

  “It is best we seek shelter in the bush, my friend,” de Grandin announced matter-of-factly. “The farther out of sight we get the better will be our health.”

  “What in heaven’s name does it all mean?” I demanded as I turned to follow him.

  “Mean?” he echoed impatiently. “It means we have stumbled on as fine a nest of pirates as ever cheated the yardarm. When we reached this island, Friend Trowbridge, I fear we did but step from the soup kettle into the flame. Mille tonneres, what a fool you are, Jules de Grandin! You should have demanded fifty pounds sterling a day from those Messieurs Lloyd! Come, Friend Trowbridge, let us seek shelter. Right away, at once, immediately.”

  2

  THE SLOPING BEACH GAVE way to a line of boulders a hundred yards inland, and these in turn marked the beginning of a steady rise in the land, its lower portion overgrown with bushes, loftier growth supplanting the underbrush as we stumbled upward over the rocks.

  When we had traversed several hundred rods and knocked nearly all the skin from our legs against unexpectedly projecting stones, de Grandin called a halt in the midst of a copse of wide-leafed trees. “We may as well rest here as elsewhere,” he suggested philosophically. “The pack will scarcely hunt again tonight.”

  I was too sleepy and exhausted to ask what he meant. The last hour’s events had been as full of surprises to me as a traveling carnival is for a farmhand.

  It might have been half an hour later, or only five minutes, judging by my feelings, that I was roused by the roar of a muffled explosion, followed at short intervals by two more detonations. “Mordieu!” I heard de Grandin exclaim. “Up, Friend Trowbridge. Rise and see!” He shook me roughly by the shoulder, and half dragged me to an opening in the trees. Out across the lagoon I saw the hulk of the Mevrouw falling apart and sliding into the water like a mud bank attacked by a summer flood, and round her the green waters boiled and seethed as though the entire reef had suddenly gone white hot. Across the lagoon, wave after swelling wave raced and tumbled, beating on the glittering sands of the beach in a furious surf.

  “Why—” I began, but he answered my question before I could form it.

  “Dynamite!” he exclaimed. “Last night, or early this morning, they looted her, now they dismantle the remains with high explosives; it would not do to let her stand there as a sign-post of warning for other craft. Pardieu! They have system, these ones. Captain Kidd and Blackbeard, they were but freshmen in crime’s college, Friend Trowbridge. We deal with postgraduates here. Ah”—his small, womanishly slender hand caught me by the arm—“observe, if you please; what is that on the sands below?”

  Following his pointing finger with my eyes, I made out, beyond a jutting ledge of rocks, the rising spiral of a column of wood smoke. “Why,” I exclaimed delightedly “some of the people from the ship escaped, after all! They got to shore and built a fire. Come on, let’s join them. Hello, down here; hello, hello! You …”

  “Fool!” he cried in a su
ppressed shout, clapping his hand over my mouth. “Would you ruin us altogether, completely, entirely? Le bon Dieu grant your ass’s bray was not heard, or, if heard, was disregarded!”

  “But,” I protested, “those people probably have food, de Grandin, and we haven’t a single thing to eat. We ought to join them and plan our escape.”

  He looked at me as a school teacher might regard an unusually backward pupil. “They have food, no doubt,” he admitted, “but what sort of food, can you answer me that? Suppose—nom d’un moinçau, regardez-vous!”

  AS IF IN ANSWER to my hail, a pair of the most villainous-looking Papuans I had ever beheld came walking around the rocky screen beyond which the smoke rose, looked undecidedly toward the heights where we hid, then turned back whence they had come. A moment later they reappeared, each carrying a broad-bladed spear, and began climbing over the rocks in our direction.

  “Shall we go to meet them?” I asked dubiously. Those spears looked none too reassuring to me.

  “Mais non!” de Grandin answered decidedly. “They may be friendly; but I distrust everything on this accurst island. We would better seek shelter and observe.”

  “But they might give us something to eat,” I urged. “The whole world is pretty well civilized now, it isn’t as if we were back in Captain Cook’s day.”

  “Nevertheless,” he returned as he wriggled under a clump of bushes, “we shall watch first and ask questions later.”

  I crawled beside him and squatted, awaiting the savages’ approach.

  But I had forgotten that men who live in primitive surroundings have talents unknown to their civilized brethren. While they were still far enough away to make it impossible for us to hear the words they exchanged as they walked, the two Papuans halted, looked speculatively at the copse where we hid, and raised their spears menacingly.

  “Ciel!” de Grandin muttered. “We are discovered.” He seized the stalk of one of the sheltering plants and shook it gently.

  The response was instant. A spear whizzed past my ear, missing my head by an uncomfortably small fraction of an inch, and the savages began clambering rapidly toward us, one with his spear poised for a throw, the other drawing a murderous knife from the girdle which constituted his sole article of clothing.