Hugger-Mugger in the Louvre (17 page)

“I'll skin 'em alive,” Bridgette said, and the pale scared girl wanly smiled.

“I'm not so much afraid of Godo,” she began.

“He takes orders from someone?” Evans asked, kindly.

Nicole began to tremble and to cry. Homer placed his hand on her shoulder. “You don't have to tell me. I'll find out for myself,” he said. Leaving the others for a moment, he descended to the kitchen and examined the envelope addressed to Nicole. It was postmarked “Luneville-sur-Seine.” Hastily he steamed it open and gasped with satisfaction as he read:

Immediately many things began to be clear to him. None of the gangsters dared call at the postoffice for his mail, so the leader sent his correspondence through Nicole, who probably gave the messages to Godo unopened. Carefully re-sealing the envelope he put it back in his pocket. Obviously, the St. Julien Rollers, who had kidnapped the professor, did not have K. Parker Seldon, who had become known as K.-S. Porker in the French press and to French officialdom generally. The Singe, who must be the new leader, was as much in the dark about the bottle magnate as Evans was himself, and wanted the middle-sized millionaire as badly. Bridgette produced, at Homer's request, an atlas and he found Luneville marked by a small dot, on the west bank of the river about fifty kilometers upstream from Rouen. A quick call to the prefecture brought to Homer's ears the troubled voice of Sergeant Schlumberger who promised to send the prefectorial launch, the
Deuxieme Pays de Tout le Monde,
to the landing near the Pont Royal and to dispatch Melchisadek Knockwoode post haste to the
place
de la Contrescarpe.

At the prospect of a river voyage, Hjalmar Jansen began bellowing a chanty, the words of which drew forth an admonition from Bridgette to respect himself. Kvek, reaching in his pocket to see if he had enough cigarettes for the cruise, came upon the sock filled with sand, which he had utterly forgotten.

“It's sticky,” he said to Evans, as he explained how he had come by it.

Evans, when he examined the sock, let out an exclamation of satisfaction. Three at a time he leaped up the stairs and knocked on Hydrangea's door. Without waiting for her to get up from the bed, where she was still weeping, face downward, he rushed into the alcove and took from the shelf above the washstand a bottle of hair tonic labeled “Psalm XXIII Anointment” and sniffed first the stuffed sock, then the unstoppered bottle. Hydrangea, who was standing close behind him, slid senseless to the floor, as if her wild-rose negligee had been empty and had slipped from a hook. With a stiff shot of gin, Evans revived the fainting Blackbird and verified the fact that she had rubbed Frémont's head with liquid from the bottle in question, a process in which, she tearfully said, the Chief took a deep delight.

“Someone's gone and slugged him right on his po' head,” she wailed, and promptly passed out again.

Conjectures were swarming through Evans' brain, to use the words of the Chinese poet “like bees through black hair” but his line of action was well defined. The St. Julien Rollers, originally a smuggling gang, had always used the river, and since their upstream hangout, at Frontville, had been found and raided the year before, it was natural that they should seek a hideout in the opposite direction. Hjalmar, with Kvek and Jackson as crew, was to take the
Deuxieme Pays
downstream as far as Rouen and inquire of all his acquaintances among the river men if any suspicious-looking craft had been seen on the Seine in the days just past. Evans decided to have Melchisadek drive him at once to Luneville, where he would have a look for The Singe.

“You'll write to me, won't you?” murmured Nicole, as Hjalmar went whistling away.

S
INCE
it has developed that the leaders of the St. Julien Rollers are as deep, or deeper in the fog, and are more anxious concerning the whereabouts of K. Parker Seldon than are Homer Evans, Lvov Kvek and the Paris police, it may increase the reader's confidence in himself, and dispel any unfortunate feeling of inferiority that may have been instilled in him in his childhood, if he is able to review the adventures of the missing business man since the latter took leave of his friends on the
terrasse
of the Café du Dôme with the expressed intention of taking a walk around the block.

It was true that his daughter Isabel had asked Mr. Seldon to buy her a copy of
Ulysses
and that, drunk as he was, he had remembered the girl's request and had purchased the book in the
rue
Delambre. The bottle magnate, like so many modern parents, had tried to keep abreast of his offspring's interests and with that
in
mind had opened up the book and had seen some words which, while they seemed to make the story less suitable for a sweet girl graduate, stirred an interest in Seldon that surpassed anything he had ever felt for
Paradise Lost
or
Lorna Doone,
the only other works of fiction whose names he could call to mind.

As he had walked along the
rue
Delambre, reading, he was followed eagerly by Dr. Balthazar St.-Jean Truc, to whom he represented untold wealth and prosperity. He had made a turn to the right and, later, another, dimly thinking he was getting back to his friends at the Dôme. Before long he was lost and, in order to clear his head, he decided to drop in at a convenient saloon for a glass of beer. Now the French word for beer is
biere
(pronounced bee-air) but those ingenious people have invented an
aperitif
named Byrrh (pronounced beer) and it was this latter that the well-intentioned barkeep set out for K. Parker Seldon.

The American, thinking the barman had made an innocent mistake, tossed down the Byrrh and for a moment thought he had swallowed some old-fashioned spring medicine. He smiled politely, offered a ten-dollar bill in payment, having nothing smaller in his wallet, and listened to assorted noises to which he could not reply. The bartender was an accommodating fellow and, tumbling to the fact that his client did not understand either French or the customs of the country, he got out a copy of
En-Tout-Cas
, looked up the exchange, and, deducting a few francs to be on the safe side, handed back three hundred and ninety-six francs. K. Parker Seldon thought he had all the best of the encounter. He still wanted beer, however, and stopped in a neighboring bar where he asked for it again. A second time he was served with the dark liquid tasting like sarsaparilla in which a few young owls had been bathing.

It should be explained that two elements had contributed largely to the success in business of the bottle and jar king, not counting the bottles and jars themselves. The first was the friendship of Hugo Weiss, the second, Seldon's own persistence. It was the latter quality that was brought into play, after the second Byrrh had come his way. He sat down at a near-by table, and with
Ulysses
before him, waited until someone else came in and received what looked like a glass of beer. Then he rose, and with a creditable bit of pantomime, indicated to the barman that he wanted the same. Promptly he got it, but after trying three or four of them, the bottle king concluded that beer in gay Paris was not what it was in the old country. With that he tried another saloon and asked for whiskey.

That time they got him the first crack out of the box. He found himself facing a tall glass with Black and White in it, and splashed in a moderate amount of siphon.

As he started off again he had dimly in his mind that he must find the cafe where he had left Kvek, and for the life of him he could not remember its name. Neither did he know the name of his hotel. That discouraged him to the point where he wanted another Scotch and soda.

At eleven o'clock that evening, Seldon's pilgrimage had brought him, by a devious route through the
place
du Chatelet, the Porte St. Denis and other historical points of interest, to a bench near the
place
Pigalle, in the heart of Montmartre, and there the chairman of the Board of Directors of the American Jar and Bottle Corporation fell asleep. Dr. Balthazar Truc, who was not accustomed to long walks in city streets, was footsore and hungry, and seeing that his incipient benefactor was dead to the world the doctor felt safe in slipping into a near-by
bistrot
for a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee. Like so many who, in Shakespeare's word, “are fit for stratagems and plots,” Dr. Truc did not touch alcohol.

The sandwich bread was tough and the ham sliced very thin, and it cost the doctor plenty, for while he was eating it some anonymous dip relieved K. Parker Seldon of his wallet, which contained several hundred dollars and about eighteen francs left from the ten-dollar bill. The thief, although having been reduced by hard circumstances to picking pockets, had not lost the last spark of human kindness, so he left his victim his passport and a sheaf of American Express checks which were not convertible without another signature.

Having eaten the unsatisfactory and expensive sandwich, Dr. Balthazar Truc came out of the café and took a seat on the bench beside the drunken man. A policeman approached but the doctor looked so respectable that the officer was satisfied all was well. Under the pretext of examining Seldon, in his professional capacity, Dr. Truc came into possession of the passport and the traveler's checks the pickpocket had passed up, and as an additional precaution, removed Seldon's unusually fine and expensive sets of upper and lower false teeth. Then he hustled into a telephone booth to call the garage where he had left his limousine. In his absence, someone got Seldon's hat, coat and shoes.

As the clock was striking midnight, the bottle magnate began to be aware of headlights passing and a taste in his mouth like leaf mold trampled by hyenas who were shedding their hair. His head was aching and around inside it rattled some phrases from the prayerbook, to the effect that he had done some things he ought not to have done and had left undone other things he ought to have done. Beside him, on the bench, was the copy of
Ulysses.
Just then there were plenty of passers-by and their interest in Seldon was instrumental in his finding out that he was lacking hat, coat and shoes. He staggered to his feet and, in trying to yell, discovered that his teeth were gone.

A crowd gathered, including several Americans, but none of them suspected from the bottle man's appearance or the sounds he made that he was a countryman in distress. Another policeman came on the scene and, being younger and less experienced than the first officer, led Seldon to the commissariat.

The commissariat just off the
place
Pigalle is one of the liveliest in Paris, or anywhere else in the world, and because so many foreigners from every land and belonging to every race seek diversion in Montmartre, the commissaire had secured the services of a squad of interpreters and linguists who would do credit to any university. When Seldon began emitting sounds and syllables, in an endeavor to explain himself and report that he had been robbed, the commissaire decided that he was probably Maltese, and rang for the Maltese interpreter. The only result was more animation and less articulateness, if possible, on the part of K. Parker Seldon. In turn, the commissaire tried Flemish, Turkish, Swedish, Indo-Chinese and Turkestan. When these failed, as did German, Dutch, Norwegian, Hebrew, Italian, Finnish, Spanish, Malay and Portuguese, the commissaire began to get fed up with the case.

It cannot be said, in all justice, that the commissaire was not a thorough man. He handed the frenzied American a well-crusted pen and a container in which was a mixture of dust and violet ink of about the consistency of cream of wheat. The marks Seldon made did nothing to shed light on his nationality, for although they resembled Chinese they ran from left to right and horizontally, not up and down.

Noticing that Seldon was clutching under one elbow a large blue-covered book, the chief interpreter took it gently away from him, opened to page 401 and was confronted by the following words:

“Deshill Holies Eamus. Send us, bright one, light one. Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa.”

“Zut, alors,”
the interpreter said, and turned back to page 264. There he lamped “Imperthnthn thnthnthn. Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips. Horrid. And gold flushed more. A husky fifenote blew. . . . Rrrpr. Kraa. Kraandl.... My eppripfftaph be pfrwritt.”

“Throw him out,” the interpreter said. “He doesn't belong on this planet at all.”

The commissaire was just about to take his subordinate's advice when Dr. Balthazar St.-J. Truc came in, exuding his best bedside manner. He removed with a flourish from a vest pocket a neatly engraved card and handed it to the presiding official, and let it be known that he was the proprietor of a sanitorium between Paris and Rouen. He said suavely that he had taken an interest in the pitiable alcoholic without language, script or country and asked permission to take him to his hospital for observation. Relieved because the sanitorium was in Luneville, many miles from his arrondissement, the commissaire made out and signed the necessary papers and wiped his brow with relief.

Of course, Seldon, having a violent headache and no French, understood nothing of what had occurred, except that he had been hustled into a police station and was being hustled out again.

He awoke early in the morning in a narrow room of which the walls and the floors were of a rather soft composition like rubber and smelled like carbolic acid and musk. The cot was peculiarly constructed, the windows were heavily screened and barred, and the door, when he tried it, was locked. Dimly he remembered his portly rescuer and a long automobile ride, still more dimly the evening that had preceded it. In his mouth and throat persisted still the vile after-taste he identified with Byrrh,
biere,
bee-air and what, if it had been about six times stronger, would have resembled just plain beer. Nothing happened, so, lying miserably on the bed, he gazed at the ceiling and tried to enumerate and classify his problems. Thus far, his first trip abroad had proved a disappointment. He had heard Weiss speak highly of France, he knew Kvek had been so eager for a glimpse of French shores that he had with difficulty been restrained from climbing one of the smokestacks of the
Ile de France.
The jar king tried to keep an open mind, and found the going very hard.