Foreign Bodies Page 21

  ‘In the Yellow Room, there’s a private detective and a professional policeman. The latter is the guilty party. In order for the parallelism of opposition to be perfect in Madame de Rouvres’s misadventure, the policeman—that’s me—has to be the honest man, and the amateur detective—that’s you, Fermier—has to be the scoundrel.

  ‘That conclusion made me laugh out loud for a start. Then I started thinking: why not, after all? It was all very feasible. You carried out the theft of the clock and the chandeliers. The next day, while pretending to examine the real jewels, you pocketed them under my very nose and substituted the fakes. After that, you pronounced the mysterious phrase: “The necklace has lost nothing of its charm and the diamonds none of their brightness.” Then you directed my suspicions, first to a theft in the distant past, then to Madame de Rouvres herself. For my part, I raised the possible guilt of the jeweller. You went round straight away to hide the stolen goods. Then, just for appearances, you started tailing Madame de Rouvres.

  ‘I wouldn’t have worked it out so soon if your incessant talk of the Yellow Room hadn’t driven me to buy the book.

  ‘Let it be said in passing that, thanks to me, the parallelism of opposition of the two affairs will be perfect.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  With a hearty laugh, Martin explained:

  ‘In the Yellow Room, at the end of the book the amateur detective allows the policeman to avoid the reach of the law. Therefore, today, the opposite must happen: the policeman mustn’t let the dishonest detective escape. You can count on me for that.’

  The handcuffs clicked firmly on Fermier’s wrists.

  ‘And to think I told you,’ said the latter disconsolately, ‘that reading wasn’t always a waste of time.’

  Kippers

  John Flanders

  Ghent-born Jean-Raymond-Marie De Kremer (1884–1967) published, it is said, more than 1500 short stories and novels as well as at least 5000 articles. Not surprisingly for a writer with such a prodigious output, he used a variety of pen-names, most notably Jean Ray and John Flanders. He was evidently a colourful character with a vivid imagination and a taste for the fantastic. In a fascinating article for Weird Fiction Review, Antonio Monteiro says that Flanders variously claimed to have been ‘a smuggler of weapons, pearls, ivory, and liquor (during the American Prohibition era), chased wild animals in distant jungles, been an executioner in Venice, a pirate in the Atlantic Ocean, a gangster in Chicago…’

  His career as a smuggler came to an abrupt end with a prison sentence, which at least gave him plenty of time to write. An admirer of Conan Doyle, he produced Sherlockian stories, although—like Maurice Leblanc—he fell foul of claims of breach of copyright, and had to modify his approach, creating Harry Taxon, ‘the American Sherlock Holmes’. The 1971 film Malpertuis, which has the more lurid alternative title The Legend of Doom House, starred Orson Welles and Susan Hampshire, and was based on a horror novel published in 1943 by Jean Ray. Monteiro highlights Flanders’ fictional preoccupation with food and drink, which is again evident in ‘Kippers’. The story, originally written in Flemish, and published by Albin B. Young, has also appeared under the names of Jean Ray and John Flanders. This is a new translation by Josh Pachter.

  That day, they served us kippers…

  Pilot Hauser considered how best to proceed with his narrative: he was not a good storyteller, but he was something of a gourmet, and anything smoked—be it ham or sausage or herring—was all right in his book.

  Kippers, delectable salmony kippers, smoky as a chimney, dripping with fat, one for each of us, of course, the real thing.

  Even Bertie the cabin boy got one. That was only fair, for although he was but a lad of thirteen summers, he did the work of a grown sailor: he polished the brass, reefed the sails, clambered up the shrouds like a cat in times of wind and heavy seas, swabbed the decks, did the washing up, served the Old Man in his cabin, sometimes even helped out the cook in the galley.

  The boy, possessed of a hearty appetite, was about to take his first succulent bite when the fish was ripped from his hands.

  It was Meesy the halfblood who did it, and the rest of the crew eyed him angrily, but none of us dared say a word, for Meesy was a giant of a man, strong as a tiger, evil as a snake.

  ‘That’s my kipper!’ cried Bertie, furious.

  Meesy unleashed a backhanded slap that flung the lad to the deck, and sat there, calm as you please, devouring the boy’s treat.

  We were underway, heading for Kingston on the island of Jamaica, to take on a cargo of sugar and rum. After a few days there, we set out across the Caribbean Sea, a strong wind in our sails.

  And that’s when our luck turned against us. As the first of the Lesser Antilles came into sight, the air suddenly blossomed with all the colours of the rainbow. The sky turned slate grey, and the sea glowed as if a fire raged far below her surface.

  Our sails went slack, and we came to a dead stop in the water.

  ‘This is bad’, the captain growled. ‘We’re in for it now. Look, the inkwell has begun to spill’.

  And truly, it was as if a flood of jet-black ink poured out of the heavens, staining the sea with heavy, silent strokes.

  ‘We’ll have plenty to do soon enough’, the Old Man went on. ‘For now, we may as well make use of the rest period we’ve been afforded to smoke a pipe and drink a glass of whisky. Who knows? This may be the last chance ever we get!’

  The poor man, he knew not how prophetic those words would be, but when the wind kicked up again it was as if the gates of Hell had flung themselves open wide.

  Our masts shattered like panes of glass, and there was no question of being able to steer a course. No matter where we desired to go, we went wherever the storm condescended to carry us.

  ‘We’d best pray’, said I, and then our old keel cracked like a dried walnut and I swallowed a gallon of salt water.

  ‘Abandon ship!’ I stammered. ‘’Tis food for the sharks we’ll be…though praise God the filthy beasts won’t reach us till we’re long drowned and dead and drifting with the waves. But a man may just as well lie buried in the belly of a shark as beneath a thousand leagues of ocean’.

  It was at that point that I fell unconscious.

  And you can imagine my astonishment when I reawakened.

  I must be dead, I thought, and my soul has beached on some distant Heavenly shore. But I was curious to know why my soul was still dressed in my dirty, ragged sailor suit instead of a pure white sheet like any normal spirit.

  At that moment, I suddenly heard a voice call my name and spied Bertie the cabin boy running toward me across a broad stretch of sand.

  ‘Well, then, Bertie’, said I, ‘so you’re dead, too, then, same as me? Do ye know where we are, lad?’

  ‘We’re on an island’, replied Bertie, ‘and we’re not dead, sir. For quite some time I feared that you were, for you never moved a muscle, but now I see as I was wrong, and I couldn’t be better pleased. I would hate to be stranded in this strange place all by myself’.

  ‘Where are the others?’ I enquired.

  ‘The others? They’re all gone, sir, we’re the only ones left. But luckily some of the barrels and chests from the ship have washed ashore with us, so we won’t go hungry’.

  ‘How long have I lain here on the sand?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a day and a half since I dragged you out of the water. I was just now thinking to dig you a hole and drop you in it, and tonight I was of a mind to take a few bits of driftwood and make you a nice cross in remembrance’.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Bertie’, said I with a bit of a shiver, ‘but I believe that plan can wait a while longer’.

  ‘There’s a crock of tobacco stopped tight enough to keep it dry’, the cabin boy announced with pride, ‘some matches and a couple of pipes. Here they are! Would you care for a smo
ke, sir?’

  ‘Indeed I would’, I cried, delighted, taking a pipe from his hands. ‘Oho’, I added, a moment later, ‘I know this one. Surely it’s Meesy’s!’

  ‘It must have fallen from his pocket when he drownded’, Bertie opined. ‘I found it atop a pile of shells just over there’.

  When once I had Meesy’s pipe filled and lit, we set off to take inventory of all the useful items the sea had spared us, and that was a considerable store: tins of biscuits and milk, syrup and salmon, barrels of corned beef, crocks of wine, drums of flour.

  ‘A pity’, said I, ‘that we don’t have that chest of kippers!’

  Bertie laughed so heartily that the tears rolled down his cheeks. ‘Pilot’, he cried, ‘what a rogue you are, sir! A chest of kippers, indeed!’

  I understood not why he found this so amusing, but truth be told it mattered little.

  A week went by. All was well. It was hot as a furnace, there on our island, but not far from the beach flowed a little stream of cool spring water, which we mixed with a splash of wine to enhance its flavour.

  One day, Bertie asked, ‘Do you still have a taste for kippers, Pilot?’

  ‘Indeed I do’, I acknowledged, ‘especially as we have no need to worry about thirst’.

  ‘Kippers do make a man thirsty, do they not?’ said the lad.

  ‘Powerful thirsty’, I agreed.

  That evening, he brought me a half a chest of kippers, which he informed me he had that very afternoon discovered washed up on the west coast of the island.

  We enjoyed them thoroughly, and doused the thirst they provoked with our usual mixture of water and wine.

  On our fifteenth or sixteenth day, as I sat quietly smoking my pipe on the beach, I spotted a three-master’s sails on the far horizon.

  ‘Bertie!’ I shouted. ‘We’re saved, lad! A ship!’

  But he had gone inland to scavenge and heard me not. I set off along the path I had seen him take, and some time later spied him standing at the edge of a ravine, staring into its depths with great solemnity, so consumed by his thoughts that he failed to observe my approach. I reached his side and gazed down into the abyss.

  How I screamed! For there below us lay the body of a man…and what a body it was!

  Tied up like a Westphalian sausage, the man had been unable to move a muscle. His face was twisted into a tortured grimace, and his blackened tongue protruded from between his lips.

  When Bertie at last noticed my presence, he started, then spoke with supreme calmness: ‘Do you recognize him, Pilot? It’s Meesy. I found him on the beach, unconscious, same as you. I dragged him here and bound him hand and foot. When he awoke, I came to see him. He was hungry, of course, and I fed him—kippers, stuck on the end of a long stick, so as not to have to come too close to him. I returned often, two or three times a day, and gave him all the kippers he could eat. You remember how much he loved them, sir, so much he stole the one was meant for me. But not a drop of water did I allow him. And when he looked as you see him now—dead of thirst, like an animal—I brought the rest of the kippers back to you’.

  With that, Pilot Hauser fell silent. A few moments later, he concluded his tale in a whisper:

  And from that day to this, gentlemen, I have never eaten another kipper.

  The Lipstick and the Teacup

  Havank

  Havank was the pseudonym of the Dutch author, journalist, and translator Hendrikus (Hans) Frederikus van der Kallen (1904–64), who along with Ivans (another contributor to this anthology) was one of the two people generally considered to be the fathers of the Dutch detective story. His main series characters were two French police officers, Bruno Silvère and Charles C.M. Carlier, the latter also being known as ‘the Shadow’). He translated into Dutch novels by such diverse crime and thriller writers as Raymond Chandler, E. Phillips Oppenheim, and Leslie Charteris. He spent most of his life in France, Spain, and England, and set many of his stories abroad, but died in Leeuwarden, the town of his birth. After his death, an unfinished novel was completed by journalist Pieter Terpstra, who subsequently produced further Havank titles under the name Havank-Terpstra.

  Over six million copies of Havank’s books were sold during his lifetime, but his work has not been widely translated. The Dutch national forensic biometric system which enables searches to be made for criminals’ finger and palm prints is known as HAVANK. ‘The Lipstick and the Teacup’, translated by Josh Pachter, comes from a 1957 collection, Havank and Co.

  ‘It was in fact only thanks to an unusual circumstance that was nearly overlooked that I was able to unravel the truth regarding the notorious murder in the Rue St Didier’.

  So Chief Inspector Silvère of the Sûreté began his story as he sat that balmy spring evening with his inseparable companion Manon and his friend Haro Aberdeen on the terrace of Le Triomphe, gazing out at the busy night life that flowed along the Champs-Élysées.

  After screwing a fresh cigarette into his long silver-and-ebony holder and setting it alight, he continued.

  The case began rather strangely.

  The telephone in my office rang. The caller would not give his name, and spoke in a voice that was obviously disguised. If the police would go to such and such an address, he claimed, they would discover there something of considerable interest. Immediately upon the delivery of this cryptic message, the connexion was broken. Later investigation revealed that the call had been placed from a public telephone box.

  Well, Inspector Charles Carlier—who, as you know, is referred to in the press as ‘the Shadow’—and I proceeded without delay to the indicated address, and we arrived simultaneously with an individual who spared us the trouble of having to break down the door of the fourth-floor flat. A sort of servant. Carlier questioned the man closely, but he knew nothing—or at least appeared to know nothing—and his dismay upon hearing of the mysterious call which had summoned us seemed genuine.

  Meanwhile, I entered the flat. The foyer, which gave onto several rooms, was in darkness. The only illumination was a narrow stripe of light that spilled from a door that stood slightly ajar onto the grey carpet. I pushed that door further open and, from the threshold, shouted, ‘Don’t move, or I’ll shoot!’

  My threat proved completely unnecessary. Within the chamber—a comfortably furnished library—there was but a single person, and he would surely never move again.

  He was dressed in evening clothes. A tall, well muscled man. But the position in which he lay left little doubt of the veracity of the telephonic message I had received. He was apparently lying as he had fallen, upper body stretched across a low divan, head thrown back, one leg extended, the other folded at an awkward angle. The right arm dangled, the left arm—its fingers balled into a fist—was half-hidden beneath the body. A red blossom stained the chest of the dead man’s stiff-fronted shirt.

  But my initial conclusion proved false, as I saw when I examined his wound more closely. There had been no gunshot here. The murder had indubitably been committed with that most deadly of blades, the stiletto. The work of a Corsican, I suspected. And the victim had not been dead for long.

  From behind me, I heard Inspector Carlier murmur the single word, ‘Remarkable’.

  I turned to see him bent over the smoking table which stood beside the divan. ‘Yes, remarkable’, he said again, and I watched him pick up a still-lit cigarette end, stub it out and carefully place it in a plasticene envelope he withdrew from one of his capacious coat pockets and redeposited upon the table.

  There was more than one reason for him to bless that solitary cigarette butt with his patented ejaculation. In fact, there were—if I remember correctly—three reasons for him to do so.

  Firstly, the cigarette had been lit but not smoked, as evidenced by the long, unbroken ash that remained on the silver candy dish where the Shadow had found it.

  Secondly, the cigarette was
of a rare and rather expensive Yugoslavian brand, a Drina.

  Thirdly, the crepe filter at the unlit end of the cigarette was red, quite a bright shade of crimson, the colour unmistakably a popular shade of lipstick.

  An additional point of interest was the half-empty teacup which stood beside the candy dish.

  ‘Remarkable’, came Carlier’s voice yet again, this time from the foyer, to which he had absented himself. ‘Did the gentleman have more than one head?’

  As past experience has proven conclusively that Inspector Carlier is anything but a fool, I suspended my investigations for a moment to consider what he might have meant by this apparently nonsensical remark.

  The Shadow re-entered the library with two hats in his hand—hats he had apparently found on the coatrack in the foyer. They were of clearly different sizes: one, I estimated, was a 48, the other a 45.

  The servant was able to resolve this riddle without delay.

  No, he assured Carlier, his master did not have two heads. And thank heaven for that, as—according to the servant—the whims and vagaries that rattled around within his single head were quite troublesome enough. Why, then, the two differently sized hats? ‘Ah, that’s dead simple, sir. The 45 belongs to my master, it does, and the 48 to his friend who shares the flat with him’.

  The obvious questions followed: Who was this friend? What work did he do? And, of the utmost importance, did the servant know where he could be found at this moment?

  Yes, indeed, he did. Most likely in a well known club in the Boulevard Malesherbes.

  The Shadow went to telephone, and I questioned the servant further. At what time had he gone out? Approximately four in the afternoon. His master was expecting a visitor, and on such occasions the servant was inevitably sent for a walk. On this particular afternoon, he had strolled to the cinema—the Madeleine, to be precise. He could offer thus no alibi, or at best an alibi that would be difficult either to confirm or disprove.