E. Hoffmann Price's Pierre d'Artois: Occult Detective & Associates Read online

  The château was perched upon a crest some hundred meters off the road. We parked the Issotta and proceeded on foot.

  Instead of knocking at the door, as seemed to be his intent, despite his quip about housebreaking, d’Artois selected a key from his ring, tried it; selected another, picked at the lock, but to no avail. The third, however, was applied with more success; the heavy door yielded to his touch, admitting us into a vestibule, thence to a salon.

  “Welcome to Tour de Maracq,” murmured d’Artois with a courtly bow. “Quick about it, and we’ll be out of here long before he has fought his last bout.”

  “But the servants?” I suggested.

  “They are few in number. It seems the marquis has an aversion to women, so that there are no female domestics to contend with. Thus it is that one of the ménage has gone to Bayonne to negotiate with a stranger who sought to buy some rare vintages which are to be pilfered from the master’s cellars. Another is keeping a rendezvous with a demoiselle who hailed him a week ago and made an engagement for today. Each has some illicit engagement whereof he will not babble. Now it would have been inconvenient to arrange on short order for lovers for any female servants…praise be to the eccentricity of Monsieur the Marquis!”

  I noted the rich tapestries; the massive teakwood furniture; the floor of rare hardwoods partly masked by Chinese and Indian rugs. And on the walls were arms of infinite variety; wavy-bladed kresses, kampilans, scimitars; halberds, assegai, lances; maces and battle-axes in endless number, all grouped in clusters. Some of these arms were burnished; but many bore dark, ominous stains.

  And thus we roamed through the house, from one apartment to another, I wondering at the beauty, the grotesquerie, the oddness of the furnishings and adornments, d’Artois regarding all with an appraising glance that revealed nothing of whatever interest he might have felt.

  Strange gods in bronze and onyx and basalt glared at us, brandished their distorted arms in futile rage, mouthed threats with their twisted lips; resented our presence in every way possible to inanimate things; inanimate, yes, but enlivened with the spiritual essence absorbed from their centuries of devotees. But no mummies. Nevertheless, d’Artois studied his surroundings. But nothing seemed to arouse his interest, until…

  “Ah…look!”

  He indicated a tiny darabukeh, a small kettledrum whose body was of grotesque carven wood, its head of a strange hide; strange to me, at least.

  “Curious, yes. But what has this to do with mummies?”

  “Nothing at all. But I fancied that drumhead…”

  A smile concluded his remark. Now what the devil significance had that little tom-tom?

  “But no mummies, Pierre.”

  “True. But one can picture a man’s mind from the house he keeps. Fancy then the odd brain that twists in the skull of de la Tour de Maracq!”

  And thus, room by room, we searched the château proper, servants’ quarters, basements, passages and all. Toward the end of our tour we stumbled upon a stairway which led to an apartment which we had overlooked.

  It was a large room of contradictory appearance: a study, if one judged from its desk, table, bookcases; a bedroom, surely, if gauged by the lordly canopied bed of antique workmanship; or a museum, if one drew conclusions from the ornaments.

  As we had done in the salon, we found again a collection of arms, armor, polycephalous gods with contorted limbs and features. And this time, mummies, two of them: one in its sycamore case, the other, not only encased, but enshrined in its massive granite sarcophagus.

  Naturally I was exultant.

  “Useless!” exclaimed Pierre. “See how they fit their cases; and see also that none of the cases would fit the princess we seek.”

  With a tape he laid off the dimensions of the mummy we sought, showing clearly that those present were of greater stature.

  “Not so good, Pierre, not so good. Apparently we’re stuck.”

  “Not entirely,” muttered Pierre absent-mindedly.

  I saw him examining an épée, a slim, three-edged dueling sword. The pommel, which was adorned with a tiny silver peacock, seemed to fascinate d’Artois. Which was natural enough, Pierre being a connoisseur of the sword, and its undisputed master. Still, business was business…

  A dried, mummified human head, wrinkled and shrunken, a Patagonian relic, hung by its hair from a cluster of arrows. And this, attracting my eye to the library table over which that gruesome trophy hung, drew me to the table itself. I picked up from the inestimable Kurdish rug which covered its top a thick book, leather-bound, and emblazoned with a peacock.

  “Hell’s fire! It’s bound in human skin!”

  “So it is,” agreed Pierre. “I wondered how long it would take you to recognize human hide when it was tanned. You passed up that little drum without noticing it.”

  And then Pierre thumbed the pages, began to read to himself. Glancing over his shoulder, I saw that he well spared himself the trouble of reading aloud. The book was either in Arabic or Persian, neither of which I could understand.

  As Pierre read, and fumed, and muttered, apparently quite interested, I devoted myself to the one bright spot in that necrophagous apartment: a painting in oils, a portrait of a young woman, lovely beyond all description, with smoldering, Babylonic eyes, full, delicately sensuous lips; fine features whose every line and curve bespoke calm, aristocratic insolence. And this smiled from a cluster of swords, and was enshrined in an atmosphere of death and doom, and gruesome relics! Whether or not the kidnaper of a mummy, this marquis was surely a freak.

  Pierre’s smile, as he laid down the book he had been reading, resembled that of a cat who has just had a pleasant tête-à-tête with the canary. Whether the worthy marquis had expressed his unusual humor by having a book of Arabic jests bound in human hide, I couldn’t say; but Pierre seemed on the inside of something which had been evading him.

  The portrait caught his eye.

  “Very lovely. Yes, I met her, twenty years ago, shortly before her untimely death. His last mistress…”

  Death…death…even that loveliness enshrined by morbid trophies was itself a memento of death. I shuddered, chilled, despite the sun’s slanting rays which warmed and illumined that necrophiliac room.

  “And he sleeps here. Or is this but an antique, a decoration?”

  I glanced again at the lordly bed, half expecting to find festoons of skulls about the canopy, fringes of scalp locks, strands of teeth. Then I noted an unnatural curvature of the drawn curtains, something which forced them forward, and out of their natural drape.

  “Que diable! Another mummy! And no case to match.”

  D’Artois took from his vest pocket his tape-line, took measurements, compared them with his notebook; studied the wrappings, the markings.

  “The very lady!”

  I advanced to pick up the aged beauty. Simplicity, this quest. And this, after all Pierre’s halo of mystery!

  “Jamais! Pas du tout! We must locate the case; all or nothing. If we alarm him, who knows what may happen to the case? Allons!”

  But before leaving, he paused to regard once more the portrait of the girl with the Babylonic eyes.

  “That was a lovely little épée, that one with the peacock on its pommel. It seems strangely familiar…well, and since the marquis has probably fought his last bout and is on his way back, we leave opportunely,” remarked d’Artois, as the Issotta’s long nose headed toward Bayonne.

  At Place de Théâtre we parked, found a table on the paving, well within the shade of the awning. D’Artois called for a weird favorite of his, whose two ingredients he himself mixed, and then diluted with charged water: a milky, curiously flavored drink, Anis del Oso and Cordiale Gentiane, a suave, insipid madhouse in a slim, tall glass. The springs of the Isle of Patmos must have flowed with Anis del Oso.

  As we sipped and smoked, I noted the great
limousine of Monsieur the Marquis de la Tour de Maracq draw up to the curbing, returning from Biarritz. Lean, aquiline-featured, elegant and courtly in bearing, and haughty as Lucifer was the marquis. Touching the brim of his high hat with the head of his stick, he acknowledged the salute of the footman, then handed from the limousine a woman whose features, to say the very least, startled me.

  “What in—!”

  “No, mon cher,” murmured d’Artois, “she is no ghost, though she may be the reincarnation of the lady whose portrait we saw at Château Maracq. There is no telling what deviltry the marquis has worked in his day, but this is a flesh-and-blood woman. And now do you see a light?”

  “A light? What in the world has she to do with this mummy?”

  D’Artois laughed maliciously.

  “I’ll swear you have mummies on the brain! But just wait. Well, that is Mademoiselle Lili Allzaneau of 34 rue Lachepaillet. Like her scriptural counterpart, she lives on the city wall in an apartment overlooking the park.”

  Which last was of course superfluous: for the mention of her address was quite sufficient. Yet La Belle Allzaneau bore the stamp of the thoroughbred; the patrician insolence, the smoldering Babylonic eyes, long, narrow, veiled; the slim, gracious hands of a princess of the blood. And her dress, and her figure, and her bearing were all in accord. Behold the grand dame of the château, and her double, La Belle Allzaneau of rue Lachepaillet!

  * * * *

  A few days elapsed, during which Pierre left me to my own devices. And I then, emerging from his preoccupation, he sought relaxation in a stroll which took us along the Adour, around, and back to the ramparts of Lachepaillet.

  To our right was the Gate of Spain, its drawbridge and guardhouse; far beneath us, at the foot of the city walls, on whose parapet we sat, was the bottom of the dry moat; while to our left front, across the moat and a hundred meters beyond its outer bank, was the Spring of St. Leon and the cluster of ancient trees that half concealed it. Though their crests almost met, their trunks were widely separated, so that the spring and its low, hemispherical cupola were in a small clearing.

  The sun was setting. Long shadows marched slowly across the gently rolling ground beneath us, and to our front. Pierre d’Artois, as he took from his case and lit a villainous Bastos, stared at the Spring of St. Leon. And then he resumed the thread of his rambling discourse, continuing a tale he had so often before begun and abruptly abandoned.

  “With that lunge I could have impaled the devil himself, for I had him swinging like a windmill, skilful swordsman though he was. Yes, and had it really been Monsieur the Devil himself, and not Santiago with whom I crossed swords, I still hold that someone must have struck me down from the rear to save his lord and master!”

  He spoke of his secret duel by moonlight with Santiago the Spaniard, two years ago, in the small clearing by this very Spring of St. Leon, and of the outcome of the affair: how, as after hard, fierce fighting he had slipped through the Spaniard’s guard to impale him with a thrust to the chest, there had been an awful flare of elemental flame, followed by blackness and oblivion; how Jannicot, his servant, had come in search of him, carried him back to the car; and how, on the return trip, they had found Don Santiago dead beneath his own car, wrecked on the way from Spain, hurrying, apparently, to keep his rendezvous with d’Artois.

  “Since Santiago never reached Bayonne to meet me, then who? A double? For that stout wrist was not that of an apparition, nor do illusions or phantoms leave footprints, nor can they beat one’s blade so that one’s arm tingles up to the shoulder. Impossible!”

  “But then what did hit you?”

  “Who knows? Perhaps a confederate, despite our having agreed to meet without seconds. But by the time I recovered full possession of my wits, several days later, any bruise the blow might have left had subsided. Yet something must have struck me…”

  In the lengthening shadows, the Spring of St. Leon appeared less and less as a place for midnight trysts, either for love or war. And though listening to Pierre’s dissertation, my thoughts were of Bayonne, this “pet” city of mine which is still girdled by walls and moats and earthworks; whose ground is steeped with blood spilled in centuries of warfare, and undermined with casements, and passages, and dungeons. Some of the passages had been built by Vauban when he fortified the town; but there were many others, of much greater antiquity; vaults wherein Roman legionaries had worshiped Mithra, Saracen emirs practiced necromancy, and medieval alchemists sought the immutable Azoth, and dabbled in thaumaturgy.

  “A curious thing I noted,” continued d’Artois, “was that a small silver peacock adorned the pommel of his épée…strange how one notes such details before a duel…”

  Silver peacock…why, we had seen a similar sword at Château de la Tour de Maracq the other day!… I wondered…

  And out of that network of passages, what might not have emerged from a mining casemate to strike Pierre from the rear and save the day for Santiago, or Santiago’s double, or the devil, or what it was that d’Artois had met?

  Something had loosened the ordinarily well-shackled d’Artois tongue. I marveled, and encouraged its wagging. And then he stopped short, pointing toward the Spring of St. Leon.

  “By the belles of Hell!” he exclaimed, quaintly distorting a selection from the American doughboy’s lexicon, which he strove most valiantly to master. “What is she doing there?”

  A girl stood at the spring; a slim girl whose white arms and shoulders and iridescent gown gleamed boldly against the shadows of the grove and the dark cupola of the spring.

  “La Belle Allzaneau,” explained Pierre; for I lacked that old man’s keen vision.

  As he spoke, she rounded the cupola of St. Leon, its low gray mass hiding her from sight.

  “But how can you recognize anyone at that distance and in this light, Pierre?”

  “Her general outline, the gown she wears…which by the way is a trifle inappropriate for the locality… I have often seen her at the Casino at Biarritz.”

  That evening, as Jannicot brought our coffee, d’Artois, after theorizing for a while about the duel at St. Leon, abruptly switched to the mummy, poor neglected lady whom he seemed to have entirely forgotten.

  “Your imagination, mon cher, is entirely dead,” he declared. “And in this quest of the mummy case (for we have the lady herself located) one needs much imagination. Alors, to you shall fall the duty of private soldier; that of sentry-go, by night. Jannicot shall walk post during the day.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. Sentry-go. You watch by night.”

  “Why pick on me?”

  “You are too conspicuous in this small town. Jannicot, watching a cow staked on the city wall, would never be noted, for he will look like any other yokel similarly occupied. Whereas you…”

  I bowed elaborately in appreciation of the compliment.

  “Whereas you, under cover of darkness—but that is obvious.”

  “But how will watching 34 rue Lachepaillet assist you?”

  “It will prevent your disturbing my meditations.”

  “Still, what has that girl to do with mummies?”

  “Imbecile! You have no imagination. So take your post at sunset, watch until morning, and report to me all the exits, entries, and doings of La Belle Allzaneau, and her visitors as well. Though few but Monsieur the Marquis call at her apartment.”

  * * * *

  And thus I spent a week, walking post by night. Not truly walking, but rather lounging on the parapet of the ancient battlements, always keeping an eye on the door of Lili Allzaneau, who lived on the city wall, who had ensnared a marquis; “a peer of France,” as they used to put it.

  And what was Pierre, beau sabreur and master of devices, doing as I frittered away my time, noting the princely cars which stopped at the door of Lili of the City Wall; listening to the sound of merriment subdued to a
patrician pitch: an aristocratic reserve in keeping with the lorette who designed to accord only to the lords of the world the pleasure of her presence?

  Each morning I rendered my report, usually with mocking formality, imitating the supposed manner of a private detective. I especially enjoyed the report of the fourth vigil: “Monsieur Pierre d’Artois, noted boulevardier and swordsman, was seen entering the apartment of Mademoiselle Allzaneau at about 11:30 P.M., apparently having returned with mademoiselle from the theater. When I quit my post at sunrise, he had not yet left.”

  “Idiot!” snapped Pierre, relishing the jest. “You slept on post.”

  “The devil I did; I watched most vigilantly.”

  “Well, since you must know it all, the apartment of Mademoiselle Allzaneau has an exit on 43 rue des Faures, the alley which parallels rue Lachepaillet. Now, are you ashamed of your base insinuations?”

  I was properly squelched. Later, I checked up on rue des Faures and verified his claim. But what in all creation had Pierre been doing in the company of La Belle Allzaneau? A man of his age! Though I could well conceive that any lady of the world could take pride in being seen with Pierre d’Artois, that fine, courtly old master of the sword.

  What a mess! Not a trace of connection between any of the diverse elements that danced before my eyes: a marquis, a mummy he had stolen, her still missing case; a duel, fought two years ago at St. Leon, and a lorette with Babylonic eyes…yes, and the lady of the portrait at the château, the double, the deceased original whose reincarnation La Belle Allzaneau seemed to be. Too much for me.

  But one does not question d’Artois to any purpose.

  A week, as I said, had passed: uneventful espionage. And then, just as I was to leave Pierre’s house to resume my vigil, he detained me.

  “A moment, mon vieux. I have again the hunch. It will happen tonight.”

  “What, for the Lord’s sake, will happen? The mummy seek her case, or you elope with Lili? Or challenge your rival the marquis?”