Hugger-Mugger in the Louvre (28 page)

“Excuse me. What did you send?” interrupted Evans.

“Two complete outfits, each, for winter and summer. I took her measurements myself, while the doctor was out of the room, and had the clothes made by my dressmaker.”

“Maggy Rouff,” Homer added, smiling.

“Don't mind him. He knows everything,” Miriam said, when Madame showed polite surprise.

“You have helped me, and also I hope, your friend the Marchioness,” said Evans cordially, when the interview was finished. “Perhaps you'll be able to take her to America with you.”

Miriam smiled, shook her head affirmatively and nodded, behind Evans' back, as if to say that the Marchioness was as good as aboard ship that very minute.

D
R
. B
ALTHAZAR
S
T
.-J
EAN
T
RUC
, after his stroll with the Marchioness de la Rose d'Antan, sat down to breakfast in his spacious living quarters. He had built a small wing on the old asylum for his own use, and because he had always dreamed of being fabulously rich he had fitted it out for living in the style to which he was determined to get accustomed. His bedroom contained a huge four-posted bed with a canopy, dating from the time of Louis XIV, ornately framed mirrors, rich upholstered chairs, and an Aubusson carpet he had accepted from Lewson-Phipps & Xerxes as payment for having pulled the British partner through a rather tough siege of delirium tremens following the Christmas holidays in the Armistice year. When he had been informed by a patient who had been in the rug business that the Aubusson had been made in Japan, the doctor had been deeply hurt, until he reflected that his patient, Basil Hamborough, had not really had the D.T.'s. He had merely been afflicted with a case of the shakes, which by a tapering treatment involving California wine Dr. Truc had prolonged six weeks.

Adjacent to the bedroom was an alcove in which the doctor breakfasted. He did not, like the patients, restrict himself to a diet that would have driven the Spartans to a hunger strike. He ate rather well, in fact, and particularly in the morning, after a stroll in the grounds. His usual snack consisted of herring and potatoes, four or five slices of assorted cheeses, coffee with cream, and several Alsatian
brioches,
a pastry shaped something like a snail, and containing raisins and citron soaked in brandy. On the morning in question, his regular bill of fare did not seem adequate to him and he decided to augment it with a lark omelet. Luxurious plans were forming and reforming in his head. At last, after a lifetime of scheming and slaving, big money loomed on his horizon. The Marchioness, just lately, he had permitted to breakfast in her own room and not gather with the other inmates at the long dreary table covered with white oil cloth and patrolled by the nurses and huskies. His thoughts of her were so tender, when he remembered her words, “Everything I have will be yours,” that he pulled a bell cord, intending to send her one of his six Alsatian
brioches
to brighten her uneventful day.

A second time the doctor pulled, then he yelled “Gus!”

There was no reply.

The third yank brought the bell cord right out by the roots and the metal contraption to which it was attached, in crashing, tore the doctor's striped gray trousers.

Another attendant answered and informed the doctor that Gus was nowhere to be found. He had disappeared in uniform, and his street clothes were gone from his room.

At any other time Dr. Truc would have raised a hue and cry, but he had to make grave decisions, so he let the other attendant serve him while he pondered the questions which swarmed in his mind. American Jar and Bottle stock, according to the
Herald
of the day before, had hit a new low. In a week it had tumbled from 104 to 32. What should he do? There were several alternatives. He could put it up to K. Parker Seldon, convince the jar satrap that legally he could never get out of the Sens Unique unless he played ball with the proprietor, then convert his assets into cash and buy the stock at thirty-two. On the other hand, he could communicate with the rival millionaire, whose name wlas Stables, and offer to double-cross the jar and bottle concern by keeping the chairman in the loony-bin until the company failed. According to Bradstreet, which the doctor thumbed tenderly as he turned over the various possibilities in his mind, Stables had twice as much money as Hugo Weiss.

Then, as so often happens, the doctor saw that his two projects—that of marrying the Marchioness' fortune and of cleaning up the bottle market—could be combined. He made up his mind to keep Seldon in captivity, without his teeth or contact with the outside world, until after Eugenie's cash was in his name. Then he could plunge in bottle stock in a major league fashion. His joy at the prospect was so intense that, in spite of the fact that his awkward attendant had let the lark omelet get cold in transit from the kitchen, the doctor burst into song, to the tune of Massenet's
Frolic in D
slightly modified to fit the words:

        
“Mais, vive l'amour, le
business man

        
Et le médicin culotté,

        
Ainsi les veuves et orphelins

        
Qui paieront tous les frais.”

 

        
(So here's to love and the business man

        
And the doctor blithe and gay,

        
Also the widows and the orphans

        
Who'll have the bill to pay.)

In an expansive humor Dr. Balthazar Truc polished off the last of the Alsatian
brioches
and, before settling down to his morning routine at his desk, walked slowly through his laboratory where, under blue lights such as those used by painters at night, two rows of guinea-hen livers rested side by side. Row “A” was from fowls whose food had been doused with certified French wine, Row “B” was from those who had unwittingly swallowed the California imitation.

Dr. Truc stuck his hand between the buttons of his coat and cleared his throat, as if addressing the Academy of Science, with Dr. Hyacinthe Toudoux cowering in the front row. “Gentlemen,” he began. “As you see by comparing exhibits ‘A' and ‘B', the latter are slightly shrunken, and are streaked with honeysuckle, perhaps a bit on the mustard side.”

If it came to a duel after that, he reflected, Toudoux would be too humiliated for effective fencing.

At his desk in his office the doctor's mood veered abruptly. He fumbled for the basket marked “Incoming” and began to holler and growl. On form 356-D, supposed to be a cook's requisition for supplies, there was scrawled a complaint that two new huskies, Kvaque and Gonzo by name, had obtained by threats of bodily harm and sabotage a ham omelet from the doctor's private stores. Truc pressed buttons so viciously that he broke two fingernails. “Send those two bandits to me this instant,” he roared when four attendants came in on the hot foot, expecting to find that Passepartout, the inventor, had got a toe-hold on the doc.

A moment later Kvek and Hjalmar entered, both with their sleeves rolled up and scowls on their foreheads. They both had forgotten the ham and eggs and thought they were up on much graver charges. They looked at the furious doctor, grinned and Hjalmar asked, in English: “Shall I poke him one in the snoot, just for luck?”

“Forbearance, my boy,” counseled the former Colonel. “We don't want to get canned until the time comes.”

Dr. Truc seemed to be fascinated by the sight of their brawny arms. He had seen huskies before, but this pair looked like destruction personified. Besides, Gus had flown the coop in an inexplicable fashion and the doctor was short of help. He contented himself with rebuking the new men and telling them that the value of the ham, the eggs and the cook's extra time would be deducted from their pay.

“Oh, that's all right, old man,” said Kvek, to smooth things over. Hjalmar was still toying with his first idea, that is to say, a poke in the snoot, but reluctantly let it pass and followed Kvek from the room. The inventor, Joseph Passepartout, having clandestinely secured a stick of stovewood, was lying in wait behind the telephone booth but he too, notwithstanding his cloudy mind, was impressed by the bare arms and resolute stride of the new pair of guards and decided to withhold his attack until Gus, his Nemesis, passed that way.

In a narrow white-walled room, Lazare was testing his bit of carpenter's chalk, the only possession he had retained after Dr. Truc and frisked him. Upstairs, in the midst of her antique furniture, the Marchioness was playing the spinet softly as she watched the play of shadows from the foliage outside her windowpane. The man in Courtyard Seven who habitually listened for worms, thought he had heard one and started scratching the hard-packed earth. Sonia Alexandrovna was gazing with rapture at an old copy of a New York Sunday supplement and wondering if there were skyscrapers in Des Moines, and if the Atlantic Ocean was bluer than the Adriatic Sea. Of one thing she was certain, she would not be married
in
white. Once out of the Sens Unique, she would never wear white again, she promised herself.

At the Paris prefecture, the proceedings were on a more rational plane than those in the Sens Unique. Schlumberger, after a session with a handwriting expert, had learned that a page of notes concerning an Egyptian King named Tout-or-Nada had been penned by Lazare on the very day of the murder, which Dr. Toudoux had finally reported must have been the Saturday preceding the Tuesday on which
The Pansy
had been stolen. Together with Frémont, who tried to defend Evans' theory of Lazare's innocence, the Alsatian sergeant led the way to the
place
Dauphine and consulted with Professor de la Poussière.

When handed the page of notes, the professor began to roar with laughter. “Dear me, I shall split my sides,” he said, waving the paper and his spectacles in one hand and wiping his eyes with the other.

“Then it makes sense?” asked Schlumberger, with a significant glance at the Chief.

“Gentlemen, it's a wonderful story. It was in Tout-or-Nada's reign, you know, that the properties of hasheesh were discovered, accidentally . . . In the year 2933, a gardener attached to the pharaoh's court burned off a field which had become overgrown with weeds, in order to plant blueberries. Some camels in a near-by lot, while the smoke from the fire was drifting in their direction, began dancing and snorting in a most unusual fashion. In fact, they lost their dignity entirely and behaved like colts, afterward settling down for a peaceful nap lasting forty-eight hours.

“Tout-or-Nada, who was then the crown prince, being one minute older than Neferkesokar, his brother, had a scientific turn of mind, and having noticed the behavior of the camels, after sniffing the smoke, had his wise men investigate the nature of the vegetation in the burned field. They found one hundred and seventeen kinds of weeds and grasses and each one in turn was tried on camels.

“The ninety-fourth was
cannabis indica
and caused the laboratory camel to pursue a female ostrich until hopelessly outdistanced, then mount a minor pyramid and slide down on his haunches, smiling and chuckling the while.

“The next week, old Setheri, the bastard pharaoh, died and Tout-or-Nada ascended to the throne. On the occasion of his father's funeral, Tout ordered incense pots of burning hasheesh to be set out at intervals of ten yards all along the route, with the result that the animals in the procession stampeded and the populace, overcome with merriment, staged an orgy to which the scribes in the kingdom were never able to do justice. The body of the king, it seems, got lost in the shuffle and was found, some weeks later, about two hundred miles down the Nile. From that time on, until Tout-or-Nada was pushed into the Nile and drowned by his treacherous twin brother while looking at the reflection of a double moon, afterward advanced as proof of Tout's divinity, every feast day or religious celebration meant free hasheesh for the populace and slaves. Such as were overcome by the smoke were dragged into the royal laboratories and carefully studied as they came out of their stupor. It was the conclusion of the wise men that
cannabis indica
was non-habit forming and comparatively uninjurious in its effects, that it could be produced cheaply on a large scale and would add much to the joy of the nation. But because it was associated with Tout-or-Nada in the public mind, Neferkesokar spitefully stamped it out and became so unpopular that when it got to be common knowledge in the streets that his son was putting bamboo needles in the pharaoh's soup, there was not an Egyptian or a foreign subject to be found who would warn Neferkesokar.”

“In your opinion, professor, could a man who was crazy translate all that from the Egyptian?”

“Of course not! Nonsense! There are not a half dozen men alive who could read the old characters so accurately, and not many who could put the story in such lucid French. I have always told my pupils that the contents of their minds will avail the world nothing unless they learn to express themselves . . . But, you know. Youth . . . Distractions . . . Scholarship is not what it was, gentlemen. Ah, no, I fear not,” the professor said, and went back to his closely written notebook which still was gritty with Sahara sand.

Downcast and bewildered, Frémont went back to the prefecture. Lazare's plea of insanity had been badly dented by Schlumberger even before it had been offered. And as the Chief sat at his desk, waiting for a word from Homer Evans, he began to envy the ancient Egyptians, who could drown, knife or poison anyone, up to and including the President of the Republic, without putting the local police to infinite trouble. He had heard much talk about Egypt of late, so much that his head was ringing. But no one had mentioned Egyptian detectives. They must have been an easy-going lot.