The Dark Angel Page 4

  “It struck. I leaped. Grand Dieu, I leaped like a monkey-on-a-stick, and came down with my heels upon its head. I triumphed, but my nerves were badly shaken.

  “My men returned. Sun Ah Poy was nowhere to be found. He had decamped. Who warned him? My native clerk? Perhaps. The tenacles of this octopus I sought to catch stretched far, and into the most unexpected places.

  “I walked in constant terror. Everywhere I went I carried my revolver ready; even in my house I went about with a heavy cane in my hand, for I knew not what instant silent death would come striking at my feet or dropping on me from the ceiling.

  “At length my spies reported progress. A new priest, a crippled man, was in the Angkor temple. He was enamored of the white dancer, they said. It was well. Where the lioness lairs the lion will surely linger. I went to take him, nor did I confide my plans to any but Frenchmen.

  “Hélas, the love which makes the world to move also spoiled my coup.

  “The Khmer are an effeminate, lascivious, well-nigh beardless race. All traces of virility have vanished from them, and craft had replaced strength in their dealings. Thi-bak, the white-girl dancer, had lived her life within the confines of the temple, and except myself, I doubt that she had seen a single white man in her whole existence—till Monsieur Archibald Hildebrand appeared. He was young, handsome, vigorous, mustached—all that the men she knew were not. Moreover, he was of her race, and like calls to like in Cambodia as in other places. How he met her I do not know, nor how he made himself understood, for she spoke no English, he no Khmer; but a gold key unbars all doors, and the young man from America had gold in plenty. Also love makes mock of lexicons and speaks its own language, and they had love, these two. Enfin, they met, they loved; they eloped.

  “It may seem strange that this could be, for the whole world knows that temple-women of the East are well-nigh as carefully guarded as inmates of the zenana. Elsewhere, yes; but in Cambodia, no! There night is day and day is night. In the torrid, steaming heat of day the population sleeps, or tries to, and only fleeing criminals and foreigners unaccustomed to the land are abroad. One might mount the temple terraces and steal the head from off a carven Buddha and never find a temple guard to say him nay, provided he went by daylight. So it was here. Thi-bah the dancer had but to creep forth from her cell on soft-stepping, unshod feet, meet her lover in the sunlight and go away.

  “Two days before I arrived at Angkor with handcuffs already warmed to fit the wrists of him I sought, Monsieur Hildebrand and this Thi-bah set sail from Saigon on a Messageries Maritimes steamship. One day later Doctor Sun Ah Poy shook the dust of Cochin China from his feet. He did it swiftly, silently. He dropped down the Saigon River in a sampan, was transferred to a junk at sea and vanished—where, whither?”

  “Here?” we asked in breathless chorus.

  “Where else? The man is crazed with love, or passion, or whatever you may choose to call it. He is fabulously rich, infinitely resourceful, diabolically wicked and inordinately vain, as all such criminal lunatics are. Where the moth of his desire flutters the spider will not be long absent. Although he did not travel as quickly as the fleeing lovers, he will soon arrive. When he does I have grave fears for the health of Monsieur Hildebrand and his entire family. They are thorough, these men from the East, and their blood feuds visit the sins of the sons upon the ancestors unto the third and fourth generation.”

  “Can that be our Archy Hildebrand, Doctor Trowbridge?” Moneen asked.

  Inspector Renouard drew forth a small black-leather notebook and consulted it. “Monsieur Archibald Van Buren Hildebrand, son of Monsieur Van Rensselaer Hildebrand,” he read. “Address of house: 1937 Rue Passaic”—he pronounced it “Pay-sa-ay”—“Harrisonville, New Jersey, E.U.A.”

  “Why, that is Archy!” Moneen exclaimed. “Oh, I hope nothing happens to—”

  “Nonsense, dear,” her husband cut in brusquely. “What could happen here? This is America, not Cochin China. The police—”

  “Tiens, Monsieur,” de Grandin reminded frigidly, “they also have police in Cambodia.”

  “Oh, yes; of course, but—”

  “I hope you are correct,” the little Frenchman interrupted. “Me, I do not discount anything which Inspector Renouard may say. He is no alarmist, as I very well know. Eh bien, you may be right. But in the meantime, a little preparedness can do no harm.”

  2. Doctor Sun Leaves His Card

  AT MY INVITATION THE Inspector agreed to make my house his headquarters, and it was arranged that he and de Grandin share the same room. Midnight had long since struck when we bid the McDougals adieu, and began our twenty-mile drive to the city. “Remember, you’re all invited here Christmas evening,” Moneen reminded us at parting. “I’m expecting my sister Avis down from Holyoke and I know she’d love to meet you.”

  We left the fog behind us as we drove northward from the ocean, and the night was clear and cold as we whizzed through Susquehanna Avenue to my house.

  “That’s queer,” I muttered as I bent to insert my latchkey in the lock. “Somebody must know you’re here, Inpector. Here’s a note for you.” I picked up the square, white envelope which had dropped as I thrust the door open and put it in his hand.

  He turned the folder over and over, inspecting the clear-cut, boldly written inscription, looking in vain for a clue to the sender. “Who can know—who could suspect that I am arrived?” he began wonderingly, but de Grandin interrupted with a chuckle.

  “You are incurably the detective, mon Georges” he rallied. “You receive a letter. ‘Parbleu, who can have sent this?’ you ask you, and thereupon you examine the address, you take tests of the ink, you consult handwriting experts. ‘This is from a lady,’ you say to yourself, ‘and from the angle of the letters in her writing I am assured she is smitten by my manly beauty.’ Thereupon you open the note, and find what? That it is a bill for long-overdue charges on your laundry, cordieu! Come, open it, great stupidhead. How otherwise are you to learn from whom it comes?”

  “Silence, magpie!” Renouard retorted, his pale face flushing under de Grandin’s mockery. “We shall see—mon Dieu, look!”

  The envelope contained a single sheet of dull white paper folded in upon itself to form a sort of frame in which there rested a neatly engraved gentleman’s visiting-card:

  DR. SUN AH POY

  Saigon

  That was all, no other script, or print.

  “Eh bien, he is impudent, that one!” de Grandin exclaimed, bending over his friend’s shoulder to inspect the missive. “Parbleu, he laughs at our faces, but I think all the cards are not yet played. We shall see who laughs at whom before this game is ended, for—”

  He broke off abruptly, head thrown back, delicate nostrils contracting and expanding alternately as he sniffed the air suspiciously. “Do you, too, get it?” he asked, turning from Renouard to me inquiringly.

  “I think I smell of perfume, but I can’t quite place it—” I began, but his exclamation cut me short.

  “Drop it, mon vieux—unhand it, right away, at once; immediately!” he cried, seizing Renouard’s wrist and fairly shaking the card from his grasp. “Ah—so; permit it to remain there,” he continued, staring at the upturned square of pasteboard. “Trowbridge, Renouard, mes amis, I suggest you stand back—mount chairs—keep your feet well off the floor. So! That is better!”

  We stared at him in open-mouthed astonishment as he barked his staccato orders, but as he matched command with obedience and mounted a chair himself after the manner of a timid housewife who sights a mouse, we followed suit.

  From the shaft of his gold-headed ebony opera cane he drew the slender, wire-like sword-blade and swished it once or twice through the air, as though to test its edge. “Attend me,” he commanded, fixing his level, unwinking stare on us in turn. “Like you, Friend Georges, I have lived in Cambodia. While you were still among the Riffs in Africa I went to nose out certain disaffections in Annam, and while there I kept eyes, ears and nose wide open. Certainl
y. Tell me, my friend—think back, think carefully—just what happened that night in Saigon when you were beset by spiders?”

  Renouard’s bright dark eyes narrowed in concentration. “My laundry was delayed that day,” he answered at length, “the messenger had good excuses, but my white uniforms did not arrive until—nom d’une pipe—yes! Upon the freshly starched-and-ironed drill there hung a faint perfume, such as we smell here and now!”

  “Exactement,” de Grandin nodded. “Me, I recognized him almost immediately. He is a concentrated extract, or a synthetic equivalent for the scent excreted by a great—and very poisonous—Cambodian spider to attract its mate. I damn suspected something of the kind when you related your experience at Monsieur McDougal’s, but I did not put you to the cross-examination then lest I frighten our pretty hostess, who had already received one shock today, of which I must inform you, but this, my friends; regardez!”

  Something squat and obscene, something like a hand amputated at the wrist, long mummified and overgrown with spiny prickles, but now endued with some kind of ghastly after-life which enabled it to flop and crawl upon bent fingers, came sliding and slithering across the floor of the hall, emerging from the darkness of my consulting-room.

  “Ah-ha; ah-ha-ha, Monsieur la Tarentule, you have walked into our parlor, it would seem!” de Grandin cried exultantly. The razor-edged, needle-pointed sword whistled through the air as he flung it from his vantage-point upon the chair, stabbing through the crawling creature’s globular body and pinning it to the floor. But still the dry, hairy legs fought and thrashed as the great spider sought to drag itself toward the scented card which lay a yard or so beyond it. “Wriggle, parbleu,” de Grandin, invited mockingly as he dropped from his refuge on the chair and advanced toward the clawing monster, “wriggle, writhe and twist. Your venom will not find human flesh to poison this night. No, pardieu!” With a quick stamp of his heel he crushed the thing, withdrew the sword which pinioned it to the floor and wiped the steel upon the rug.

  “It was fortunate for us that my nose and memory co-operated,” he remarked. “He was clever, your friend Sun, mon brave, I grant you. The card, all smeared with perfume as it was, was addressed to you. Naturally your hands would be the first to touch it. Had we not acted as we did, you would have been a walking invitation to that one”—he nodded toward the spider’s carcass—“and I do not think he would have long delayed responding. No. Assuredly you would have moved when he leaped on you and pouf! tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day after that at latest, we should have had the pleasure of attending a solemn high mass of requiem for you, for his bite is very poisonous.”

  “You don’t suppose any more of those things are hiding ’round the house, do you?” I asked uncomfortably.

  “I doubt it,” he returned. “Renouard’s friend could not have had time to pack an extensive kit before he left, and spiders and reptiles of the tropics are difficult to transport, especially in this climate. No, I think we need have small fear of a repetition of that visit, tonight, a least. Also, if there be others, the center of attraction will be the scented card. They will not trouble us unless we tread on them.”

  FOR SEVERAL MINUTES AFTER we had entered the study he sat in silent thought. At last: “They can not know for sure what rooms you will occupy, mon Georges,” he remarked, “but the bathroom is always easily identified. Trowbridge, my friend, do you happen to possess such a thing as a sheet of fly-paper at this time?”

  “Fly-paper?” I asked, astonished.

  “But certainly, the stuff with which one catches flies,” he answered, going through the pantomime of a luckless fly alighting on a sheet of tanglefoot and becoming enmeshed on it.

  “I hardly think so,” I replied, “but we can look in the pantry. If Nora had any left over in the autumn she probably stored it there.”

  We searched the pantry shelves as prospectors might hunt the hills for gold. At last, “Triomphe,” de Grandin called from his perch upon the step-ladder. “Eureka, I have found it!” From the uppermost shelf he dragged a packet of some half a dozen sticky sheets.

  We warmed the stuff at the furnace door, and when its adhesive surface was softened to his satisfaction de Grandin led us to the bathroom. Stealthily he pushed the door open, dropped a double row of fly-paper on the tiled floor, then with the handle of a mop, began exploring the recesses beneath the tub and behind the washstand.

  We had not long to wait. Almost at the second thrust of the mop-handle a faint almost soundless hissing noise like steam escaping from a gently boiling kettle came to us, and as he probed again something like a length of old-fashioned hair watch-chain seemed to uncoil itself upon the white-tile floor and slither with the speed of light across the room. It was a dainty little thing, no thicker than a lead-pencil and scarcely longer, prettily marked with alternating bands of black, yellow and red.

  “Sacré nom!” Renouard exclaimed. “Le drapeau Allemand!”

  De Grandin bent still farther forward, thrust his stick fairly at the tiny, writhing reptile and endeavored to crush its small, flat head against the wall. The thing dodged with incredible quickness, and so swiftly I could scarcely follow its motion with my eye, struck once, twice, three times at the wood, and I watched it wonderingly, for it did not coil to strike, but bent its head quickly from side to side, like a steel spring suddenly set vibrating by the touch of a finger.

  “You see?” he asked simply, still prodding at the flashing, scaly thing.

  Although his efforts to strike it were unsuccessful, his strategy was well planned, for though it dodged his flailing stick with ease, the snake came ever nearer to the barricade of fly-paper which lay before the door. At last it streaked forward, passed fairly over the sticky paper, then gradually slowed down, writhed impotently a moment, then lay still, its little red mouth gaping, lambent tongue flickering from its lips like a wind-blown flame, low, almost inaudible hisses issuing from its throat.

  “You have right, my friend, it is ‘the German flag,’ so called because it bears the German national colors in its markings,” he told Renouard. “A tiny thing it is, yet so venomous that the lightest prick of its fangs means certain death, for aid can not be given quickly enough to counteract its poison in the blood. Also it can strike, as you noticed, and strike again without necessity for coiling. One has but to step on or near it in darkness or in light, for that matter—and he is lucky if its venom allows him time to make his tardy peace with heaven. It is of the order elapidæ, this little, poison thing, a small but worthy cousin of the king cobra, the death adder and the tiger snake of Australia.”

  He bore the fly-paper with its helpless prisoner to the cellar and flung it into the furnace. “Exeunt omnes,” he remarked as the flames destroyed the tiny cylinder of concentrated death. “Die you must eventually, Friend Georges, but it was not written that you should die by snake-bite this night. No. Your friend Doctor Sun is clever, but so is Jules de Grandin, and I am here. Come, let us go to bed. It is most fatiguing, this oversetting of Doctor Sun’s plans for your American reception, my friend.”

  3. A Lost Lady

  THE DAY DAWNED CRISP and cold, with a tang of frost and hint of snow in the air. My guests were in high spirits, and did ample justice to the panned sole, waffles and honey in the comb which Nora McGinnis had prepared for breakfast. Renouard, particularly, was in a happy mood, for the joy the born man-hunter takes in his work was fairly overflowing in him as he contemplated the game of hide-and-seek about to commence.

  “First of all,” he announced as he scraped the last remaining spot of honey from his plate, “I shall call at the préfecture de police and present my credentials. They will help me; they will recognize me. Yes.”

  “Undoubtlessly they will recognize you, mon enfant,” de Grandin agreed with a nod. “None could fail to do so.” Renouard beamed, but I discerned the hidden meaning of de Grandin’s statement, and had all I could do to keep a sober face. Innate good taste, cosmopolitan experience and a leaning toward
the English school of tailoring marked Jules de Grandin simply as a more than ordinarily well-dressed man wherever he might be; Renouard, by contrast, could never be mistaken for other than what he was, an efficient officer of the gendarmerie out of uniform, and the trade mark of his nationality was branded indelibly on him. His rather snugly fitting suit was that peculiarly horrible shade of blue beloved of your true Frenchman, his shirt was striped with alternate bands of blue and white, his cravat was a thing to give a haberdasher a violent headache, and his patent leather boots with their round rubber heels tapered to sharp and most uncomfortable-looking points.

  “But of course,” he told us, “I shall say to them, Messieurs, if you have here a stout fellow capable of assisting me, I beg you will assign him to this case. I greatly desire the assistance of—”

  “Sergeant Costello,” Nora McGinnis announced as she appeared in the breakfast room door, the big, red-headed Irish detective towering behind her.

  “Ah, welcome, mon vieux,” de Grandin cried, rising and extending a cordial hand to the caller. “A Merry Christmas to you.”

  “An’ th’ same to ye sor, an’ ye, too, gentlemen,” Costello returned, favoring Renouard and me with a rather sickly grin.

  “How now? You do not say it heartily,” de Grandin said as he turned to introduce Renouard. “You are in trouble? Good. Tell us; we shall undoubtlessly be able to assist you.”