Death from a Top Hat (8 page)

She made no reply to this, and Gavigan’s inquiry made a right-angle turn.

“How did you know there was death in this room tonight before you entered it?”

She closed her eyes. “I could feel it.”

“Clairvoyance, I suppose?”

She frowned slightly, then nodded as if she didn’t like the way he said it.

“Could you turn some of it on now and tell us who killed Sabbat?”

For the first time her voice was something other than flatly expressionless. There was a hint of anger in it as she said:

“Do I look like a fool, Inspector?”

“Meaning that you could but won’t?”

“Meaning that you wouldn’t believe that any information I gave had been clairvoyantly obtained. Madame Blavatsky used her occult powers once in pointing out a murderer for the Russian police. Their gratitude took the form of trying to arrest her as an accessory.”

“I suppose there’s something in that,” the Inspector admitted. “And if I promised immunity?”

Rappourt shook her head. “I wouldn’t trust you.”

Gavigan stepped closer to her. “You know, of course,” he said threateningly, “that I can arrest you for the séance you have admitted holding. Perhaps if you told me who the murderer was…”

“I know nothing of the sort.” Rappourt’s shiny black eyes glistened angrily. “You are bluffing. I collected no fee.”

“Maybe not, but you’re out to get yours one way or another. And you’ll do well to remember I’ve got an eye on you from now on. Can your guests of last evening swear that you were at the séance the whole time?”

She smiled now, for the first time, in an unpracticed sort of way, hesitated a moment, and then with cool amusement said:

“For two hours during the latter part of the evening I was in a deep trance.”

“And how do I know you didn’t walk in your sleep?”

“Because, as my guests will tell you, I was sitting in a large, thoroughly examined canvas bag, the mouth of which was drawn tightly around my neck and the drawstring tied with many knots to the back of my chair. The knots were sewn through with needle and thread and covered with sealing wax. Ropes around my legs and body outside the bag held me to the chair, and the chair was screwed to the floor of a cabinet whose door was triple locked with all the keys held by the sitters.”

There was a slightly adenoidal expression around the Inspector’s mouth. Visibly he collected himself and started to speak, but Rappourt had not finished.

“Tapes had been sewn and sealed about each of my wrists, and their further ends, which passed out through two small buttonhole openings in the bag and through an air vent in the door of the cabinet, were held constantly by the experimenters.”

Gavigan glanced helplessly toward Merlini’s back, but the latter gave no indication of having heard. The Inspector nosed about for a more fruitful line of investigation. “What,” he asked Rappourt fiercely, “do those hentracks on the floor mean?”

“They are obviously some form of invocation. Sabbat seems to have been a black magician.”

“What other kinds are there?”

“Black magic is occult power applied for evil; white magic is occult power applied for good. According to Manley P. Hall there also exists a gray and a yellow magic. Gray magic is the unconscious perversion of—”

The Inspector had had enough of that. He cut in, “Who is Surgat?”

“I don’t know that. There are many demons.”

Gavigan turned toward Merlini, scowling. “Do you know?”

The latter pushed a large dusty folio back into place.

“No,” he said, and then faced us, his eyes on Rappourt. “But if we don’t find it here, this reference library isn’t as complete as I think it is. May I ask Madame Rappourt a question?”

This, I think, was what the Inspector wanted. He nodded.

Merlini smiled at her innocently and asked, “Was your séance—pardon me—your experiment conducted in the darkness usual to the production of that type of phenomena?”

He had only half done when Rappourt began acting strangely. Her eyelids dropped; her arm swung up jerkily; the back of her hand pressed against her forehead. She swayed backward, and then forward, stiffly, and too far.

Gavigan caught her as she dropped.

¹
His more scientifically acceptable books were:
Daughters of Hecate, The Road to Endor
—
A History of Prophecy,
and
Studies in Superstition,
this last an encyclopedic six volume work that is still the standard authority on the subject.

²
A colony of 1000 Lemurians (from the Pacific’s even more ancient lost continent of Mu) was reported as late as 1932 to exist on the slopes of Mt. Shasta surrounded by an invisible wall of force that prevents approach by either man or forest fires!

³
See Montague Summers :
The Vampire in Europe,
Dutton, 1929, and
A Popular History of Witchcraft,
1937; Alexander Cannon:
Powers That Be,
Dutton, 1936; Hamlin Garland:
Forty Years of Psychic Research,
Macmillan, 1934; Charles Fort:
Wild Talents,
Kendall, 1932; Maurice Magre:
Magicians, Seers and Mystics,
Dutton, 1932; etc.

And if you really want to go to town, see Harry Price:
Short-title Catalogue of the Research Library from 1472 A.D. to the present day,
University of London, Council for Psychical Investigation, 1935.

Witchcraft is not dead, nor are Satan’s winged hosts entirely banished to the Limbo of Myth. Psychic phenomena have, through the ages, been so intertwined with superstition, mental aberration, and religion, and the issue so clouded by fraudulent imposters, venal quacks, and the clumsy exposés of prejudiced conjurers that Science, engrossed in the mysticism of modern Physics and prostituting itself on the couch of commercial Chemistry, disdains to investigate, afraid that it might—as it would—uncover some shining Truth its materialistic philosophies could not explain.

Col. Herbert Watrous: A Plea for Psychical Research

T
HE
I
NSPECTOR PLACED
R
APPOURT
in the armchair, and Quinn, like a well-trained jack-in-the-box, sprang up from his chair and was swiftly at the department’s black suitcase. He brought an ammonia ampoule which he held and broke under her nose. Merlini knelt at her side and began rubbing her wrists. After a moment her eyelids fluttered, and she moaned faintly.

The Inspector went to the door and stood there talking to Malloy, who was just outside. They spoke in undertones. Pretending to watch Rappourt, I backed in their direction until I was close enough to eavesdrop.

Gavigan asked, not very hopefully, “Well?”

Malloy said, “A blank. He doesn’t think so, but he’s hot any too sure. Lousy witness. The over-cautious type.”

The Inspector seemed to have a card up his sleeve, but apparently didn’t know whether or not it was an ace.

Rappourt showed signs of reviving, when suddenly her body tensed. Her head jerked and her eyelids flicked back, exposing white eyeballs, no pupil. Her breath was expelled in a long whistling exhalation through clenched teeth.

Quinn warned, “Hey, Chief. She’s going to throw a fit!”

Merlini, watching her closely, said, “I think she’s going into a cataleptic trance, Inspector. Fresh air should help. You’d better get her outside.”

Gavigan eyed her odd behavior with curiosity, and then alarm. “All right,” he said, “see to it, Malloy. Put her in a taxi and have a couple of the boys deliver her back at her hotel. If she’s not out of it by then they’d better get a doctor.”

Malloy and Brady carried her out.

When they had gone Gavigan looked at Merlini speculatively, then growled, “What is this trance business, anyway?”

“I don’t think she wanted to answer any more questions. She does the catalepsy well, don’t you think?”

“Oh—just an act, huh?”

“I think so. Chafing her wrists gave me a chance to feel her pulse. Instead of being subnormal, it was excited.”

“And what was the idea of aiding and abetting her by suggesting that I get her out of here?”

Merlini spread his hands wide. “What else can you do with a woman like that? Besides, you seemed to have finished with her—and she didn’t seem to want to answer my question.”

“Why not? Did it have any occult significance I didn’t get?”

“I’ll know that when we get an answer either from Watrous or the others who attended the séance. My main purpose in asking was to see if she’d recognize me.”

“If that song and dance was because she recognized you, then your effect on the ladies is damned devastating. Explain yourself.”

Merlini snapped open a cigarette case and held it toward the Inspector. “You may have noticed that I moved upstage when she came on and stuck my nose in a book. I’ve met the lady before. She’s changed a good bit, and I wasn’t quite certain until she spoke. But I couldn’t mistake that voice. In 1915 she was in London, and her name was Svoboda.”

“During the war, eh? I suppose she did a rushing ouija board business then?”

“Not ouija boards, Inspector. She’s more original than that. But she did evoke quite a few spirits of the war dead for their relatives. She’s obviously not English, and the Military Intelligence Department began eyeing her suspiciously. I was playing the Palladium, and a member of the department asked me to check up on her for them. They thought her séances might be a clearing house for spy information, foreign agents attending and going home to decode her spirit messages. ‘Heaven is just too lovely. Having wonderful time. Wish you were here. Love. Cecil’ meaning ‘Convoy embarks Liverpool Friday. Midnight,’ That sort of thing.”

“Svoboda the Secret Agent,” I said, “sounds like a dime novel.”

“That’s what I thought,” Merlini answered. “If she was a spy, you would hardly expect her to go asking for investigation with a name like that. But the M.I.D. was taking no chances.”

“Well,” Gavigan asked, “what about it? Is that what she was doing?”

“I don’t know. My presence on several of the London Psychical Society’s investigating committees had given me rather more notoriety among mediums than I’d suspected. I wore a pair of dark glasses and was introduced as a blind man, but I should have taken more pains with the disguise. She recognized me, and the séance was a complete frost. All very ordinary and nothing startling enough to require either supernatural or fraudulent aid. So she may have been a spy, or she may merely have been hostile to conjurers. I never did find out. On the way back to the hotel that night I managed to be one of the few persons in London on whom the Zeppelins successfully dropped a bomb. I got a splinter in my arm that terminated my engagement, and I sailed for home the first boat out.”

“I’ll check London on that,” Gavigan said. “What about these séances she’s giving now?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to see one. Watrous brought her over here just recently, and she’s not given any public performances as yet. But if she is fraudulent and has Watrous fooled, she’s got something good. He’s nobody’s fool, even though he does talk like it at times. Trouble is, he wants to find genuine phenomena, and that unconscious bias is his weak point. He’s never bit on anything obvious though, and the few mediums to whom he has given his okay are still bones of contention.”

“Well, just now it’s a case of does he get
my
okay. O’Connor! Send Colonel Watrous in here.”

The Colonel’s entrance was excited and angry. He waved his hands. Meeting the Inspector’s unsympathetic stare, he drew himself up, adjusted his pince-nez more firmly on his bulgy nose, and cleared his throat with a prefatory rumble.

“Where is Madame Rappourt?” he blurted. “What have you done to her? Why are you…I’ll have you know…”

“Pull up, Colonel,” Gavigan ordered. “I’ll have you know something. This is a murder case, and since I happen to be in charge I’ll ask the questions. You answer ’em. Madame Rappourt gave us some answers and now it’s your turn. You were at the séance last night?”

The Colonel’s carbonated sputtering went suddenly flat. His still open mouth plopped shut. Then, after a moment, it opened again. “I was at Madame Rappourt’s apartment from ten until nearly three-thirty A.M. But what…”

“Who tied her up in that bag?”

“Why…ah, we all did…but what did she…what has that to do…”

“Stop asking questions! What happened after you tied her up? Come on. Talk!”

Watrous puffed up, pigeon-like. “I fail to see that any connection exists between our experiments last evening and the lamentable tragedy that has happened here.”

“I don’t see any myself, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. My job is to find out. All I know, at the moment, is that her specialty is the supernatural. And this case has more than its share of spook atmosphere…”

Watrous seemed to get the idea. He took off his glasses and tapped them nervously on his hand. “I’m not at liberty at this time to release any statements concerning the results of our experiment of last night.”

“Was it a dark séance?”

Watrous looked puzzled, but nodded. “Yes, why?”

Gavigan threw a glance where Merlini had been, only to discover that he was back poking into the bookshelves again. He returned his attention to the Colonel.

“Then no one can testify that you were in the apartment continuously?”

The glasses weren’t tapping now. “On the contrary,” Watrous’ tone was indignant, “two persons at least could swear I was there every minute. During the time that the lights were out we were arranged in the usual psychic circle, each person holding the hand of the one next to him. To establish a proper contact, you know.”

Inspector Gavigan’s patience looked a bit thin. He had examined three suspects so far and had drawn three gold-plated alibis. He left it at that for the time being.

“Who is Surgat?” He flung the question at Watrous.

“I don’t know,” the latter answered. “I’ve come across the name somewhere in my researches, I’m sure, but…” He frowned thoughtfully at the chalked incantation, shaking his head.

“Does the name Svoboda mean anything to you?”