Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology (16 page)

With the painting dragging from his left hand, Nate reached for the nearest girl.

“The painting first,” Arango called.

Nate stopped. “Why?”

“Let’s get it out of the way.”

Of course—right now it was a hindrance, dragging on the ground and getting in the way. Nate hastily rolled it, then leaned over the edge and handed it down to Arango.

The Mexican grinned broadly. “You have shown me what one has to do, amigo. I thank you for that. My people thank you as well. You are always welcome with us. I shall make it known.” He yanked on the horse’s reins and spun to the side.

“Wait,” Nate cried. “Where are you going?”

“Soon there will be a revolution!” Arango pulled up hard and his horse reared and pawed the air. “We will take back what was taken from us.” He hefted the painting above his head in a sign of victory. “And this will help to finance it!”

“You’re leaving us,” Nate said incredulously.

“You have horses,” Arango pointed out. “You have your life. Be thankful.”

“But you could help us!”

“Solo el que carga el cajon sabe lo que pesa el muerto,”
Arango told him. “It means ‘Only he who carries the coffin knows how much the dead man weighs.’ Know this, Nate Dupes, and live it. You cannot know what someone else carries in his soul, nor feel the suffering he bears.”

Nate’s mouth twisted. “Trust no one, you mean.”

“It’s more than that,” Arango said with an almost sad smile. “Much more. Adiós, amigo—and know that you gave birth to the Revolution!”

And Arango was gone, leaving Nate on the side of a hill in the middle of nowhere with twin girls, feeling like he was standing in the Garden of Gethsemane.

* * *

Fifteen years later, after a decade and a half of experiences, but never a day of true happiness, Nate Dupes sits at a café table in New York City and recognizes a picture in the newspaper. The black and white image shows him a Mexican revolutionary bandit whom he knows was born José Doroteo Arango Arámbula.

But now, in this newspaper and forever after, this Mexican is known as Pancho Villa.

By

It should, I suppose, be entirely appropriate that I sat with my friend C. Auguste Dupin in the gloomy autumn shadows inside the cavernous and—some would insist
haunted
—walls of the decrepit mansion we shared at No. 33 Rue Dunot, Faubourg St. Germain. We had been to see a rather melancholy play about phantoms and murder and it had brought us into a discussion of many things gruesome and bloody. Over excellent wine and a tray of small cakes, we whiled away the hours speculating on the nature of the supernatural. I have a tendency toward belief in it, or at least in some parts of it; however, Dupin will have none of it.

“Specters are the product of a lack of information,” he said as he lit his pipe, “as well as a failure of perception.”

“How so?” I asked, intrigued.

He took several long puffs of the strong Belgian tobacco he had been favoring lately, blowing ghostly clouds of smoke into the air between our chairs. Small vagaries of wind made the smoke dance and twitch before whipping the hazy tendrils from sight.

“There is an example,” he said. “Had you, a credulous man, peered in through a frosted window and beheld the dancing smoke that has so recently departed us, and had you not perceived the meerschaum in my hand, might you not have thought that inside this house, haunted as it is, at least in reputation, you beheld a specter? And, had you been even more credulous—as say our charwoman has demonstrated herself to be on so many occasions—wondered if the two gaunt men who sat with heads bowed together were not, in fact, sorcerers who conjured the dead from the dust of this place?”

“Perhaps,” I said cautiously, for I know that to agree or disagree too quickly with Dupin is the surest way to put a foot into a bear trap of logic.

“Then consider the nature of a ghostly sighting,” he continued, warming to his thesis. “Most of them occur at night, and of those many in remote places, darkened houses, dimly lit country lanes, and church yards—places where proper lighting is seldom provided. Such places lend themselves to morbid thoughts, do they not? Now additionally consider the nature of the sighting itself. So often there is a sense of unnerving coldness, a perception that something unseen is moving so close that its frigid reach brushes against the perceptions of the witness. Add to this the fact that most specters are only seen as partially materialized figures or amorphous blobs of light and shadow. Reflect further on the time of day, and let us remember that at night we are often sleepy and closer to a dreaming state than we are at the height of noon.” He sat back and puffed out a blue stream. “The evidence we collect are elements of circumstance and a predisposition of mind that not only lacks clarity and is likely fatigued, but which is also shaped into a vessel of belief because of the macabre atmosphere.”

“So it is your opinion that all ghosts are merely the creations of overly credulous minds who witness—what? Mist or fog or smoke on a darkened night? How then do you explain the movement of these specters? How do you dismiss the moans they make?”

“I do not dismiss any sounds or movement,” said Dupin, “but I challenge the authenticity of the eyewitness account. Let me hear an account of a ghost who appears on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées at two o’clock on a May afternoon, and present me with at least three unbiased witnesses who have had no time to confabulate, and then perhaps you will ignite a flicker of credulity even in a stoic such as me.”

Outside, the wind blew against the house and found some crack in the slate tiles on the roof so that its passage was an eloquent wail, like a despairing spirit.

Dupin nodded as if pleased with the confirmation of his argument.

We sat there, smoking our pipes and listened to the sounds of the old house, some caused by the relentless wind, others by the settling of its ancient bones into the cold earth. Despite the cogency of his argument, we both huddled deeper into our coats and cast curious looks into the shadows that seemed to draw closer and closer to us.

Then there was a sharp
rap-tap-tap
that was so unexpected and so jarring that we both jumped a foot in the air and cried out like children.

However, when the door opened, in came Monsieur G—, the Prefect of the Parisian police, and his presence broke the spell. Dupin and I glanced at each other, aware that we had both been as surely spooked as if we had seen a specter in truth. We burst out laughing.

“Well, well,” said G., looking rather startled and confounded by our sharp cries and ensuing gales of laughter, “now behold another mystery. Have I come in upon some great jest or have you two fine gentlemen taken sure and final leave of your faculties?”

“A bit of both, I dare say,” said I, and that sent Dupin into another fit of laughter.

G. smiled thinly, but it was clear that he was forcing a cordial face. Dupin saw this, of course, and quickly sobered. He waved G. to a chair.

“Let me pour you some of this excellent wine,” I suggested. “It is a Prunier Cognac, 1835. Quite scandalous for a blustery autumn night in a drafty pile such as this, but appropriate for whiling the hours away with dark tales of shades and hobgoblins.”

However, G. remained standing, hat in hands, nervous fingers fidgeting with the brim.

“Gentlemen,” said he, “I wish I could join you, but I am afraid that those things of which you jest are perhaps out in truth on this wretched night.”

Dupin lifted one eyebrow. “Do you say so? And what spectral vapors could possibly conspire to draw the Prefect himself away from a quiet evening at the Jockey Club de Paris?”

“It is a matter of...” began G., but his voice trailed away and stopped. “Wait, how could you possibly know I was at that club this evening?”

Dupin waved the stem of his meerschaum as if dismissing the matter as being of no importance. “A blind man could see it.”

“Then I am blind,” said I. “Please light a candle to this darkness.”

The briefest ghost of a smile flickered across Dupin’s mouth and I knew from long experience that although my friend can appear both cold and inhuman at times, particularly in his pursuit of the pure logic of observation and analysis, he has a splinter of perversity that enjoys both the confounding of whatever audience is at hand, and the later satisfaction of their curiosity.

Affecting a face of boredom, Dupin said, “The scandalous matter of race fixing which was resolved so satisfactorily last month was entirely the doing of our good Prefect of the Parisian police. One of the more notable applications by modern law enforcement of the value of evidence collection and the science of observing details to discern their nature rather than forcing assumptions upon them.”

G. colored slightly. “I make no pretence to brilliance,” he murmured. “And I openly admit to having applied methods I have observed in recent cases with which you were involved.”

“Just so,” said Dupin without false modesty.

“But how does that place Monsieur G. at the club this evening?” I demanded.

“It is customary of such clubs to grant special memberships to distinguished gentlemen who have been of service to their organization. It would be entirely out of character for the Jockey Club de Paris to have eschewed that policy after G. saved them from scandal and ruin.”

“Agreed,” I said slowly, taking the point.

“It is also in keeping with the policies of such clubs to hold a gathering to celebrate the induction of a new member. In virtually any other circumstance such a dinner would be held on a Saturday, with much fanfare and mention in the press.”

“But there was no mention,” I said, having read every paper from front to back.

“Of course not,” said Dupin. “Scandal cannot be advertised. No, such a gathering would be on a night when the club would be the least well-visited, and that is a Thursday night because of the big races in England on Friday. Many of the members would be crossing the channel. That would leave only the most senior members and the governors of the board in Paris, and it would be they who would want to offer their private thanks. They lavished food and drink upon you, my dear G., and before you ask how I know, I suggest you look to your cuffs, coat sleeve and waistcoat for evidence. Crème sauce, sherry, aspic and... if I am not mistaken...
pâte à choux.”

G. looked down at his garments and began brushing at the crumbs and stains.

“A gentleman who has had time to go home and brush up would never have ventured out in such a condition. No, you came from that robust dinner to the scene of some crime.”

“But it could have been any club that serves a fine dinner,” said I.

“True, true,” admitted Dupin, “however, I believe I can put a nail in the coffin with the unsmoked cigar I perceive standing at attention in your breast pocket. It is wrapped by a colorful paper band, which is the invention of Cuban cigar makers Ramon and Antonio Allones, and although other cigar makers have begun to similarly band their cigars, the Allones brothers were the first and theirs is quite easy to identify. These excellent cigars are not yet being exported to Europe, but they are often given as gifts by American horse racing moguls to colleagues in Great Britain and France. It is unlikely anyone but a senior official of the Jockey Club would have such a fine cigar; however, it is
very
likely that such a prize would be presented to the man who solved the French horse racing incident.”

“By God, Dupin,” said G. in a fierce whisper. “Your mind is more machine than flesh and blood.”

“Ah,” said Dupin, “how I wish that were so. Machines do not fatigue. They are pure in function.” He sighed. “There are other bits of evidence as well, both hard clues and inspirations for informed speculation, but I have no desire to show off.”

I kept my face entirely composed.

“Nor do I wish to waste any more of our dear friend’s time. Tell me, G., what
has
brought you away from food and festivities and compelled you even further to visit us?”

“Murder,” said G. “Murder most foul and violent.”

“Ah,” said Dupin, his mouth curling with clear appetite.

“But come now,” I said, “you earlier spoke of something unnatural.”

G.’s eyes darkened. “I did, and indeed there is nothing at all
natural
about this case. A man was killed without weapons by a killer who seems to have vanished into thin air.”

Dupin’s eyes burned like coals through a blue haze of pipe smoke.

“We shall come at once,” he said.

* * *

And so we did.

We piled into the cab G. had left waiting, and soon we were clattering along the cobblestoned streets of Paris. And within a quarter hour we found ourselves standing outside a building which was divided into offices for various businesses engaged in international trade.

Gendarmes filled the street, keeping back a growing knot of onlookers and preventing anyone but official persons from going into the building. As I alighted I spied an ancient-looking woman swathed in a great muffler of green and purple leaning heavily on a walking stick. She raised a folded fan to signal our cabbie. I paused to help her inside. In a thickly accented voice she asked the driver to take her to the train station.

Dupin, who waited for me while I assisted the lady, glanced at his watch. “She’ll have a long, cold wait. The next train isn’t for three quarters of an hour.”

“Poor thing,” I said. “She was as thin as a rail and already shivering with the cold.”

But our concern for the old lady was swept away by the Prefect, who loudly cleared his throat.

“Gentlemen,” he said with some urgency, “if you please.”

Dupin gave a philosophical shrug and we turned to address the building and the knot of police who stood in a tight cordon around the place. They gave G. a crisp salute and stood aside to let him pass. However, they eyed us with some curiosity. The Prefect did not pause to introduce us, as was well within his right.

We climbed three flights of stairs to a suite of offices that occupied half of the top floor. There was a cluster of official-looking persons on hand, including several gendarmes in uniform, two detectives from the Prefect’s office, a lugubrious medical examiner waiting his turn, and an ancient cleaning woman who sat shivering with fear on a bench, her face still blanched white from what she had witnessed.