Hugger-Mugger in the Louvre (26 page)

“Let us in,” whispered Kvek and Hjalmar, and an instant afterward were wringing the bottle magnate's hand. They urged Seldon to be patient for a day or two, if need be, promised to get his teeth for him at the earliest possible moment, and hastily departed. Hjalmar started out to stalk the Marchioness and her frock-coated medico, while Kvek decided to have a look around the doctor's office before the other guards got up. The patients, most of whom slept fitfully, began howling for breakfast but no one paid the slightest attention to them.

Finding himself in the spacious grounds in front of the Sens Unique, Jansen began to regret that he was wearing white duck and that the terrain afforded so little cover. By flitting from shrub to shrub, however, he managed to work his way unobserved into a damp patch of raspberry bushes from which he could see Dr. Truc and the Marchioness and overhear every word they said. The pair were seated on a bench beneath an apple tree that spread its limbs over a secluded mossy pathway and, because it interfered with conversation and the long hat pins had narrowly missed putting out the doctor's left eye, the Marchioness had removed her broad-brimmed hat and placed it on the seat beside them.

“Christ, what are patterns for!” muttered Hjalmar as in shifting his position he practically impaled himself on raspberry thorns.

“To think that I shall know happiness at last,” the Marchioness murmured.

“That you shall, my dear,” responded Dr. Truc. “I shall devote myself to you alone. I'll give up my profession, my practice, the institution I have built up so painstakingly. We'll go to a foreign land, where no word of the recent unfortunate happenings can reach you.”

“But, when, Balthazar? How long must we wait?”

“As soon as I can set you free, we'll fly. There are technicalities, my dear. Technicalities,” the doctor said.

“How relieved I shall be, when I can give everything I have to you,” the Marchioness said. “I hope the details won't prove a burden to you. I've much more money, I'm afraid, than I had when I first came here. The Marquis could only use the income. And now his property, which he couldn't squander, the apartment and its contents, the chateau in the Ain . . . Perhaps I should ask my old lawyer, Maitre François Ronron, to administer . . .”

“Ah, no. Not necessary, my dear.”

“Of course, I'd feel safer if you'd take charge. And wouldn't it simplify matters to place all my property in your name? Then I wouldn't be obliged continually to be signing things.”

“All that will be arranged,” the doctor said, so pleased with the prospect that he reached for her hand and started humming an aria of Massenet to which he fitted mentally a lyric substantially as follows:

        
(Tenor)

                
Les titres vont dégringoler

                
(
Helas pour les bouteilles
)

                
Mais le
business man
va s'employer

                
A les faire regrimper.

        
(Chorus)

                
Ah, vive les jolis titres

                
Qui vont bien s'amplifier.

    
If the doctor had been singing in English, the words would have gone something like this:

        
(Tenor)

                
The stocks will take a nose-dive

                
Now the business man's away

                
But when it's known that he's alive

                
They'll go up till there's hell to pay.

        
(Chorus)

                
Three cheers for jar and bottle stock

                
That'll hit the sky that day.

Hjalmar was eager to be off and away, and to report to Evans the strange turn of events that had come to his attention. But the lovers lingered until, one by one, and then in droves, the day-shift mosquitoes got into action. Their first choice was undoubtedly Hjalmar, although they by no means neglected Dr. Balthazar St.-Jean Truc. The Marchioness, wrapped in thought, seemed not to mind them but when the doctor arose and suggested they go inside, she acquiesced with the gentle grace that characterized all her movements.

While this touching scene was being enacted, Lvov Kvek was making progress also. The heavy door of the doctor's office was locked, the windows were fastened from inside, but by standing on the doorknob Kvek was able to force open the transom, through which he wormed his way in. The office contained a flat-topped desk the top of which was covered with a writing pad, wire baskets marked “Incoming” and “For Future Reference” and a pair of telephones. The side drawers of the desk were locked by patent fasteners connected with the central drawer which had been locked with a key. Hastily Lvov cleared everything from the desk, picked it up with its contents and turned it upside down. Then he shook it until the fasteners worked loose and the drawers came open. That accomplished, he righted the desk again and placed the articles that belonged on top where he had found them, as nearly as he could remember. A hasty search yielded K. Parker Seldon's passport and, wrapped in tissue paper, the set of false teeth.

Elated, the Russian closed the desk drawers again, and let himself out of the office, the door of which had a spring lock. In less than a minute he was at the door of Seldon's cell, which he entered joyfully but, in his haste, forgot to lock behind him. Seldon, the moment he was unstrapped, shook hands, began to babble and, when Lvov took the teeth from his pocket the American fitted them into place and told his story, as much of it as was known to him. He had taken a walk, got lost, had a drink or two and instead of finding the Dôme, he had dim recollections of a bench on some boulevard, a police station, a ride in the doctor's car and his awakening in the booby-hatch.

Kvek expressed surprise that his charge was so little shaken by the experience, and was further astonished to see, rising on the cheeks of the business man, a pair of blushes that would have done credit to a schoolboy in his first game of postoffice.

“Your cousin!” murmured K. Parker Seldon. “The beautiful Sofia! Now that I have my teeth, I shall ask her hand in marriage.”

“She always wanted to go to the States,” said Kvek. “Let us go and drink, let us feast; I will give her away, and such a wedding.
Da,
dum dum
dum. Da
da de
dum.
Can you not hear the peal of the organ? Can you not smell the bridesmaids, the vodka, the heaps of caviar?”

His rhapsody, in which Seldon had joined by marching up and down the cell to measures of Lohengrin, was interrupted by a grunt of rage as Gus tackled Kvek from behind. The powerful and disgruntled guard, whose passion for Sofia had kept him near the boiling point for weeks on end, had overheard the last part of the conversation and could contain himself no longer. He had the advantage of weight and surprise and for a moment it looked as if Kvek would be battered to a pulp before he could strike a blow. But the floor was soft, as floors go, and once he had recovered his presence of mind, the Russian managed to get a half-Nelson and even up the contest. K. Parker Seldon, finding that what strength he had made little difference, one way or another, started using his head. There was nothing in the room that would serve for a weapon except the straitjacket. One sleeve of this Seldon wound around Gus's thick neck, then began twisting from behind. Gus began to soften up, and soon he was limp. Kvek slipped the straitjacket over his legs, strapped his arms, and unmindful of Seldon's protest, made an impromptu gag from the soliloquy of Marion Bloom, hastily wrenched from
Ulysses.

In the corridor was a telephone booth for use of the employees, operated, of course, by coins. Kvek, with what little help Seldon could give him, dragged the unconscious guard to the booth and dumped him in. Tearing off the fly leaf of
Ulysses
the Russian printed “OUT OF ORDER” in large block letters, and, taking the thumbtacks from a notice signed by the doctor, to the effect that employees were forbidden to use the other phones, he replaced it with the placard he had improvised. He had barely got Seldon safely back in his room when Hjalmar came in from the raspberry patch, his skin scratched and swollen with mosquito bites and his white duck uniform stained with raspberry juice.

“We'll chuck him into the launch tonight after dark,” said Jansen, when told what had happened to Gus.

I
N THE
laboratory of Dr. Hyacinthe Toudoux, bright lights shone pitilessly through the night and their brittle rays bounced on and off the eyeballs of the medical examiner from all directions. The cabinets were filled with nickel-plated instruments. Most of the furnishings were nickel plated, including the coffee machine Toudoux had accepted years before from a café keeper in lieu of an obstetrician's fee. Table surfaces were of white enamel, walls and ceiling painted white. The setting was by no means restful or conducive to calm.

On the slab, in the near-by fish tank, were the remains of the Marquis de la Rose d'Antan. Muttering imprecations, the doctor walked circles around them, trying to extract the clue to the cause of death that had eluded all his tests. Had the doctor been able to keep his mind entirely on the autopsy before him, he might have got better results, but each time he allowed his eyes or thoughts to wander from the gruesome task, he saw, dancing in the air before him, like fumes from alphabet soup, the mocking words of Dr. Balthazar Truc as printed in the
En-Tout-Cas.

“Livers do not swell but shrink! The scoundrel! Saffron and mustard. Bah! I shall run him through the heart. I shall run . . .”

At that point, the doctor got his wires crossed and switched back to the corpse. “Run through the heart” was the
leitmotif
that was carried over from one theme to the other, so absent-mindedly the doctor picked up a powerful magnifying glass, a 500 candle-power flashlight, and turned both on the heart of the former Minister of Beaux Arts and Public Monuments. Dr. Toudoux's hair stood on end and seemed to give out electric sparks. He began babbling, walking in circles, then returned with glass and flashlight. No doubt about it! The heart had been pierced with a slender instrument, not larger than a sail needle, which had left a scar the size of a thumbtack hole but which, under the doctor's powerful glass, looked like a bird's-eye view of Mount Vesuvius.

“I've got it! The Marquis was stabbed,” he said, executing a sprightly “forward and back” as he used to do as a lad when dancing the quadrille. He paused in front of a life-size chart on the wall, which showed exactly what Adonis would have looked like if Venus had sliced him in halves. Squinting and peering, and skillfully estimating angles, Dr. Toudoux loosened a safety-pin he had used to hold up his shorts and touched with the point the spot on Adonis's heart corresponding to the puncture in that of the late Marquis de la Rose d'Antan.

“Stabbed from directly in front,” the doctor said, “by someone with a steady hand who was approximately five feet seven inches tall. Death must have been instantaneous. Practically no bleeding. Afterward, cleaned like a haddock and stuffed with natron and asphalt. Ah, now I am free to seek out that unspeakable Truc. This time he shall not escape me. I shall run him through . . . Damnation!” In his excitement he had ruined the forty-dollar chart of Adonis by slashing it in a vital spot with the safety pin.

Raising the heavy shades of the laboratory, Dr. Toudoux was astonished to find that it was broad daylight, in fact, about eight o'clock. The Chief of Detectives Frémont had not yet put in an appearance at the prefecture and Toudoux had no intention of giving important news to Schlumberger, who had arrested his friend, Lazare. The worst of it was that Lazare, as the doctor remembered him, had a marvelously steady hand, acquired by stuffing the tiniest insects, and was exactly five feet seven inches tall.

“I must telephone Monsieur Evans, and at the same time I can ask him to act as my second when I perforate Truc. Had the former been a member of my fencing team in 1910 . . . but then, I suppose he was scarcely in his ‘teens. Ah, time. Ah, exactions of science. California Medoc! Heliotrope! Vindication!”

In the course of the year that had passed since Dr. Toudoux had first been associated with Evans, and at his suggestion had traced the mysterious Mickey Finn, their acquaintance had ripened and the doctor had learned that his new friend did not like to be disturbed at eight o'clock in the morning. So the doctor crossed the Pont St. Michel and ordered breakfast, if that is not too dignified a term for what the French eat in the morning, at the Café du Départ. Nine o'clock was the deadline he set for Evans' slumber.

At nine the phone rang and Evans, sighing, walked toward it in his pyjamas. He listened carefully to the medical examiner's report, and told Dr. Toudoux, in confidence, about the two extra jars of hearts, livers and lights on the shelf in
An Sens de Mesur.

“Good God! Do you mean to say I've two more autopsies to perform? I shall resign. I shall go back to the Congo ...” the doctor said.

“No need to concern yourself with the new exhibits. I'll find out all about those deaths myself, without dissecting anything. In fact, already I've quite a definite idea,” said Homer. “And furthermore, put off plans for dueling, at least for a while. I want you to come with me to Luneville, where I am sure we shall discover that Dr. Balthazar St.-Jean Truc has placed himself so far below the level of a gentleman that meeting him on the field of honor would be unthinkable.”