# Black Lily

Extracted from Lippincott's Magazine, 1915 July, pp. 111–123.
Black Lily
byAchmed Abdullah
AT first we were amused at Hattie’s remark, and then frankly embarrassed. Of course, it served Joe Acheson right. Still, we were very grateful when Johnny Fresne smoothed things over a bit by springing that yarn of his.
Joe Acheson never could carry his liquor like a gentleman. He was born and bred in the slums of Belfast; and all the millions he had dug out of the Kootenay and the Coeur d’Alene could not change the nature of the beast. That remark of his was, of course, aimed directly at Johnny:
“I never had any use for a fellow who uses perfumes—darned effeminate, I call it.”
You should have seen Hattie Clarke blaze up. All the world knew that she had been in love with Johnny ever since he drifted from Victoria across the Sound into Seattle.
“Well, Mister Joseph Acheson, do you really think that a man, to be a man, must necessarily smell of tobacco and perspiration?”
Only she didn’t use that last word. You see, she had been to finishing school in the East after her dad struck oil on his ranch. but she wanted to get beneath Joe’s skin, and Joe’s abridged Webster contained no such elegant Norman diction as “perspiration.” So Hattie gave him the plain, unvarnished Anglo-Saxon.
It was then that Johnny broke in and saved the situation. He looked at Hattie, then he looked at Joe (two entirely different sorts of looks); and then he looked at the whole table.
Two minutes later we were listening to his yarn. There was no beginning to it. No explanation. He just told us. And he just naturally held us.
Before we knew it, he had us dead away from the rain and the pine trees of the Northwest, and we were floundering about in an atmosphere which was part West Africa and part Berlin. He spoke of both places as if they were as familiar to him as his pocket.
We never knew, we never asked what were his exact relations with that West African slave dealer of whom he told the tale. We never knew what sort of a string he, himself, had on him. Nobody ever asked Johnny any questions, you see. He was just Johnny, and he was good enough for Seattle: of uncertain nationality, but with a fine house, down in Queen Anne’s Addition, a cellar full of château wines, a Rolls-Royce, a library which he read, and a fifteen-carat education and breeding and all-round knowledge.
Also, Hattie was in love with him. That in itself was a good-enough recommendation for our crowd.
YES, yes, perfumes. Scents. I know some people don’t like them. Now, that does remind me.
When old Durand decided, on the spur of the moment, to leave West Africa and make tracks for Europe, I had to go with him, of course. As long as I stuck close to his coat tails, he meant money in my pocket. No, no, no. Not blackmail. But there was a certain debt of gratitude unpaid between him and me, and so I thought I had better keep in sight of both debt and debtor. Durand was one of those chaps who have to be reminded of their obligations every once in a while.
I didn’t like the idea of leaving. Durand’s house was no end comfy. His black servants were models of devotion and faithfulness and competence. Why, I never knew. For the old man used to sjambok them for the slightest offence or mistake. Well, that may have been the very reason, now I come to think of it. Yes, I hated to leave his house, the finest house in Freetown, the finest on the whole blessed West Coast, from Morocco clear down to Walfish Bay. And drinks? My word—that chap could take rum and dry champagne and English orange bitters and a few other ingredients, and make a drowned man thirsty with the smell of it.
All right then. We took an old Woermann tramp out of Freetown. Durand had an idea Berlin would be the right place for him. He had helped the Germans that time when they made their last periodical attempt to paint that charming nigger republic of Liberia black-white-red. And so he knew a few things which put the Wilhelm-Strasse on their good behavior.
But he was scared just the same, dead scared. Served him right. Slave trading is all right in its place, I fancy. But it was rather a dirty, low-down trick to make a raid into the villages of the very Galla tribe who had considered and treated and worshiped him as their own, special, no-end-wise-and-benevolent White Chief. Even then he could have got away with it, if he had had sense enough to divide profits with the medicine man. But Durand was a whole-hogger.
And the result was that every evil-smelling, oil-smeared Galla, from Stanley Pool clear down to the Coast, was on his trail, with the cheerful intention of catching their former, no-end-wise-and-benevolent White Chief and roasting him to a turn over a slow fire. A very slow fire, my friends.
But the greatest mistake he had made, as I mentioned, was that he had refused to divvy up with the medicine men.
Those gentry turned on him. Declared him bad ju-ju, which is as sure a way of killing a white man on the West Coast, as swinging him from a manila rope over a precipice. The rope may bear the strain, the weight, for a day, an hour, or a week ... a year even ... but in the end it’s bound to give way. And then, there is a mess.
So behold us, leaning over the railing of that black Woermann tramp, drinking in the last whiff of the shore wind, the African shore wind. It wasn’t a bad sort of smell; a little moist, it is true, a little jungly and feverish, and a little acrid. But not bad at all. I remarked upon it to the old man. I said that you could blindfold me and transport me via the Magic Carpet route to any city I’d ever been in, and I would locate myself by the smell of it.
“It’s unmistakable, Durand,” I said. “Now, there’s New York: sewer pipes and sun-melted asphalt and freshly-laundered shirtwaists. London is all rain and mutton-grease and stale ale, with a dash of gin. Paris a mingling of...”
He interrupted me with a laugh.
“The philosophy of odors, eh?” He drew a huge bandana from his pocket, and there was a heavy, overpowering perfume coming from it. “Myself, I adore scents; rich, sweet scents,”
It was so. I had never ceased to wonder why this strong, male mass of a man, who had spent three-fourths of his life in acrid, stinking Africa, huddled close against the breast of rank, brutal Nature, should have this almost feminine love of heavy scents. But it surrounded him like a halo. He never changed the brand. He used a peculiar Black Lily odor made by Rallet in Moscow; and I have seen it on his dressing-table in all possible shapes and forms: as perfume, lotion, extrait végétal, talc powder, and what-not.
I spoke of it.
“Oh, yes,” he replied. “It’s as much a part of myself as this disgusting, rolling double chin of mine.” He looked at me with a sharp, meaning stare. “If ever you miss me, Johnny, follow the trail of my perfume. And if the perfume is not there, remember, my friend, that I myself cannot have been there either.”
There was such a heavy, cutting expression in his accents that it disturbed me. I asked him to be more explicit.
But he only laughed.
“It is nothing, my friend. I only ask you to remember that this Black Lily perfume is as much part of myself as this broad, thick-lipped, horrible mouth, these leering eyes.... I am not beautiful, eh?”
He laughed again; then he turned to other matters. Nor did he speak of it again during the whole journey.
Well, we got to Berlin. He called on the Wilhelm-Strasse, and I do not think they were very glad to see him. But old Durand knew a few things. So when he asked them to do a little something for him, they were so pleased at the modesty of his demand, that they agreed to it right then and there.
This is what he asked them:
“If anything happens to me in Berlin, I want you to publish the facts in every newspaper. My friend, Fresne, here, will give you the details. If I should be murdered, if there should be every indication of my being murdered, don’t trouble about investigating too much. And if my poor, fat, murdered old body should be missing, don’t bother about that either. Just pass the good word along to your Police Department.”
We left the Wilhelm-Strasse, and drove back to our hotel. We had put up at the Eden, on the Kurfürstendamm, across from the Zoo.
I had opposed the idea of our staying there. I had reminded him of the threats of the Galla medicine men. I had tried to persuade him that the safest place for him would be a small pension in the West End, one of those select affairs kept by a major’s widow, which does not flare the names and pedigrees of its distinguished visitors as advertising matter in the dailies.
But Durand had only laughed.
“My dear Johnny, you don’t know the West Coast as I know it. Nor do you know the Gallas as I know them. A Galla, for sake of revenge, will climb a minaret with his bare feet, and track the mists of dawn to their home. There are no odds for my safety between the biggest hotel in Europe and the meanest, obscurest Bloomsbury lodging-house.”
So we had, as I said, put up at the Eden, and the newspapers duly heralded the arrival and the daily doings of the great West African.
It was a ripping drive back from the Wilhelm-Strasse. As soon as we reached Berlin, he had bought the best motor-car to be had for money, and the chauffeur was a wonder.
At the turning of the Leipziger-Strasse our car slowed, then stopped.
A funeral procession was coming from the opposite direction. It seemed a rotten bad omen. Durand had left the Coast to get away from death as conceived and interpreted by the merciless brains of a Galla ju-juist. I didn’t feel a bit like losing him. He was worth pounds, shillings, and pence to me. And so—just to encourage myself—I turned to him with a jesting word. But it froze on my lips when I looked at him. He also was watching the sable cortège of grief. But not in sympathy. An inward, spectral, nameless repulsion was mirrored in his eyes. He was shivering. His face was ashen-gray; and he held on to his seat with nervous, quivering hands.
His words, when he spoke, seemed irrelevant. They were so wholly personal, self-searching; and he was a man who always made a point of clothing his feelings in a cloak of inscrutability. Afterwards I understood.
He spoke in a trembling, veiled voice.
“IT am afraid of death. Death is to me something concrete, tangible. Perhaps because I have no belief in a future state.” Suddenly he turned to the driver with a snarl which showed his stumpy, yellow teeth. “Drive on. Drive on. What .... funeral procession?.... To hell with it. Drive on, you cursed, maudlin fool!” Our car whirred softly on its way. Durand gave a gasp of relief. Then he continued. “To me life is a plain, business-like compact with existence. Death is the breaking of the compact. It holds unknown, bleak agonies. It is pregnant with sinister possibilities. I will not be crushed into a coffin, Johnny. I will not be huddled underground. I will not be choked into the stinking, sodden, wormy, mildewy earth. Death? ... no, no, no... it’s a disruption of continuity... it’s....”
Suddenly he regained his self-possession. He looked at me with a little shamed, apologetic smile. The terror vanished from his eyes like the breath from the face of a looking-glass.
It was like watching a black, threatening sky; and all at once there is a yellow-bursting flame of sun. I was relieved when I saw the snowy pile of our hotel standing out of the distance. A stiff drink, a quiet talk ... and then we could map out a plan of campaign how best to checkmate those Galla murderers... .
Then the car stopped again. A traffic policeman held up his hand to give the city-bound rush a chance to wheel on for a few blocks.
I was about to light a cigarette when a clutching claw shook the match from my hand. Durand was gripping my arm. He made several attempts to speak. His face turned purple. When finally he mastered his voice, it came with the rhythmic stamp of a piston-rod.
“Look ... look... Merciful Madonna ...”
I was impatient.
“For heaven’s sake, man, what's wrong with you?”
He pointed into the crowd with a shaking finger.
“Look ... there ... next to the girl in red ... the negro ... it is a Galla... it is M’pwa, the medicine man....”
He sank back in his seat, shielding his face with his hand. But he was not quick enough. The negro had seen him. And there was an expression in his eyes which I shall remember to my dying day.
I could not keep my eyes off the black. I knew that, caught in the crush at the curbstone, he would not attempt murder right there and then. But I stared at him, evilly fascinated.
I am not a superstitious man. Nor am I fantastically-minded. But when I saw the black, I ... oh, it’s hard to explain ... but the Galla seemed to be a thing apart. That’s it. He was a thing absolutely apart. All the people around him, Germans, strangers to me, foreigners in speech, thought, ideal, aspiration, humor. Yet, when I looked at the Galla, I felt myself and all the others, the foreigners, massed into a certain sharp, comprehensive unity. It was not because he was a negro. I am used to them. I have lived in Africa, in the Southern States, in Jamaica.
The men and women, even the little children, tolerant because of their tender, unthinking years, looked at the black and stared. Not with curiosity—a negro is no longer that in Europe—but with subconscious terror and loathing. He was to them—they felt it, knew it—a strange, unclean thing, not wholly human, not wholly animal. His massive, crunching jaws, his blazing, yellow-white eyes, his plum-colored, shiny skin, with the scaly, purple spots on the sharp cheekbones, his swinging, apish arms—a West Coast negro! But they had never seen one before. They knew nothing of the horrible brutalities, the ghastly, sensual cruelty which has made his race an offal, a stench in the nostrils of clean folk. If I had harangued them and told them that this man was a Galla from the West Coast hinterland, they would not have understood. Galla? The word meant nothing to them.
They only felt that here was a monstrous, dim, terrifying thing. It should not exist ... crush it under foot, stamp your heels into its face.. and then hurry home, to the clean, clean fireside, and change your shoes and wash your hands—and forget.
The whole impression didn’t last more than thirty seconds.
But in that fleeting space of time I understood better than ever before why Durand had made such a quick get-away from Freetown.
When, finally, the traffic policeman raised his hand again and our car went on its way Durand lifted his hands from his face. He had regained his self-possession at once. There was a smile on his lips, as joyful as the dawning of day after night. I marveled at it; this sudden recuperation and lifting out of the depths of fear. It was perhaps the man’s chief characteristic, and, as such, responsible for his colossal success. This sudden strength of his always popped out amain when you thought him crushed and beaten. It was both his weapon and his stanchion.
The evening was uneventful. Of course, it was clear that the ju-ju men had found out immediately about his departure, had trailed him, and had sent one of their number after him, doubtless by a fast mail packet.
It was on the following day that the strange event occurred which looked so abstruse at first, and afterwards so simple, so diabolically clever.
A survey of the suite we occupied at the Eden will serve to bring into relief certain aspects of the strange enigma which was shortly to face me.
The apartment extended over the entire left wing of the second floor. It was very secure from intrusion, since it could only be reached by a long corridor which connected it with the main landing. At the crossing of the main landing and the corridor were the floor clerk’s desk and chair. These were set against the wall, at such an angle that they commanded both staircases, the elevator, the landing, and the length of the corridor which branched off to our suite. The floor clerks worked in shifts, day and night. Nobody could come or go, by elevator or stair, without coming under their notice. And they gave me the impression of being extremely sharp and observing young men.
From the corridor a door opened into our first room, our sitting-room. There were two windows and a balcony giving on the street, and, at the other end, two broad French windows opening on a paved courtyard. This courtyard, nicely laid out in the Spanish style with potted palms, a motley mass of flowers, and a tinkling fountain, was used as an open-air restaurant. Two folding-doors opened from the front room: the left to my suite of bedroom, bathroom, and dressing-room; the right to Durand’s. Beyond the latter’s was a charming little private dining-room with a small lift which connected directly with the kitchen. There were windows in all these rooms, giving either on street or courtyard. But the main point was this: that anybody wishing to enter Durand’s or my suite, or the private dining-room, had to pass from the main landing, up the branch corridor, and through our front room.
It was really a very safe place. For the street on which our windows opened was the Kurfürstendamm; the main thoroughfare of the West End, lined on both sides with cafés, restaurants, and shops of all sorts; and crowded with people day and night. And the courtyard, thanks to the warm and early spring, was already in use as an open-air restaurant. Not only that. It also did a rushing trade as a café until that shockingly late hour which the Berliner considers the proper moment for turning in; and as soon as the last guest had departed—seldom before three in the morning—a brigade of felt-slippered scrubwomen took charge of it to prepare it for the breakfast hour.
Late in the afternoon, I entered Durand’s suite for a bit of talk. The first thing that struck me was again that heavy odor of Black Lily perfume which floated about him like a halo. It was stronger than ever, and I found it very disagreeable. Too pronounced. Too sickly. More objectionable than musk or patchouli.
Durand was in excellent humor; of an elephantine kiddishness. And that was the more surprising as, at intervals during the day, the Galla medicine man, accompanied by another negro (obviously a German-speaking black; for I saw him give orders to the waiter) had visited this courtyard café, and was frequently looking up at our rooms. It was evident that he had located his quarry, and that he was now evolving some devilish campaign of murder.
I spoke of it to Durand. I suggested that he might go once more to the Wilhelm-Strasse, and have the black arrested and deported.
He laughed.
“No, no. What would be the use? Another one would come out of Africa and finish the job. And if he failed, another, and still another. I rather imagine that I am doomed.” He laughed again. “But perhaps this perfume of mine which you despise so much, may tide me over for a little while.”
This eternal, mysterious allusion to his sickening perfume got on my nerves. Also his silly laugh, and his braggadocio about his being doomed.
Yet his laugh did not sound like an affectation, or Dutch courage. Something seemed to amuse him. And he would not tell me.
He simply refused to discuss it. He would not answer my questions by so much as a single word. When finally I insisted, impatient, angry, a look came into his sardonic eyes which scared me.
He stared at me for several long, embarrassing seconds, a thin, sneering grin sagging in the corners of his heavy lips. Then he walked over to the escritoire and wrote rapidly. He gave a short laugh, and handed me what he had written.
I read:
“You only believe what you are able to absorb into your stupid, clogged pores with the help of your five senses. Therefore you will think me either a madman or a liar. Still, I know the West Coast hinterland, and you do not.
“I tell you that I do not dare to open my mouth. Why? I shall tell you: because the medicine men of the Galla tribes have a sixth sense, closely akin to a sharp sense of hearing, but with a telepathic kink attached to it which enables them to hear even the faintest whisper as long as they are within reasonable distance of the speaker.
“That Galla down there in the courtyard is not watching. He is listening. Now stop your fool questions, and let me do things my own way.”
“Tear it up,” he said when I had finished. I obeyed. “Now let’s put on our duds, and go for a drive.”
We had a ripping spin down the Doberitzer Landstrasse, as far as the race track. We watched two or three races. Suddenly Durand rose. He said he had forgotten something very important at the hotel.
No, no, he would rather go himself. He would have the chauffeur burn the gas both ways. It would only take him a minute at the hotel. He would be back in no time. I should wait.
I did wait.
I waited for two hours, perhaps longer. The races were over long ago. I was the only man left in the grandstand. The attendants finally begged me to move on. Sorry to disturb me; but the place had to be cleaned.
I walked slowly up the Döberitzer Landstrasse for a distance, watching hard for Durand’s big, sulphurous-blue touring-car. But it did not come. I was getting nervous.
Had there been an accident? Had he perhaps run abeam of that Galla medicine man, and been murdered?
The last thought decided me. I jumped into a passing taxi, and told the driver to make full speed for the Eden.
Durand’s car was not in front of the hotel.
I hurried upstairs. I had ugly forebodings ... a shadowing forth, in visual form, as it were, of thoughts my mind was afraid to formulate.
Running past the floor clerk, I fired a quick question at him.
“Has my friend returned?”
“Yes, sir. But he left again—over half an hour ago.”
So he had been in his room for something like an hour. He had told me he would stay only a few minutes. He had had time and to spare to return to the race track.
I rushed up the long corridor. I opened the door, and looked into the front room. Then I stumbled in a half-faint. My bones seemed to give way under me, like lumps of cotton. A thousand seas roared in my ears; the bloated, orange suns of a thousand worlds swung madly before my eyes...
I gave an inarticulate, choked cry.
The floor clerk came running.
“Du lieber Herr Gott! Was ist denn los?”
His English failed him in the excitement of the moment. He supported me. He dragged me across the threshold. Then he, too, cried out.
“Murder... murder ... oh, my God...”
The room was in frightful disorder. Two chairs were overturned. The cloth was dragged from the center table. Somebody had clawed desperately at the heavy velvet window curtains, bringing part of them down in a ragged mess. There were fresh, sticky blood splotches on wall and carpet. There had been a struggle, a bitter, life-and-death struggle.
The door to Durand’s bedroom yawned wide-open, like an evil, sneering, bestial maw. We hesitated at the threshold. Then the clerk, with that icy courage which is so much akin to deadly fear, walked in. The next moment, he staggered back with a shriek, terrified, shivering ... pointing at the white panel of the door which connected with the dining-room.
I looked, following the direction of his shaking finger.
My breath came like a bellows. A chokepear seemed to clog my throat. My tongue grated against my teeth. Violent perspiration beaded my forehead.
On the door—stark, ugly, sharp-lined, accusing—was the tell-tale imprint of a bloody hand!
I don’t know how long it took me to regain self-possession. But suddenly I heard my own voice, as if coming across hazy distances. I instructed the clerk to let nobody into the apartment, not even the manager; but to telephone immediately to police headquarters.
The clerk left on a run.
I looked about me.
The bed was in terrible disorder. Blood was all over it. The sheets and pillows had been slashed to ribbons with a knife.
Durand must have lain down for a moment. Then the assassin had come in, I thought, had hacked him with a dagger.
Yes, here was a ragged piece of the brown silk pyjamas which Durand affected. There was a torn lock of his scanty, gray hair.
But where was the corpse? Had the dying man dragged himself into the front room to escape his fate? It was evident from the disorder. But there was no trace of him there, either. He must have dragged himself back again. Or, perhaps, he had tried to rush out into the corridor. The murderer had struggled with him, to tear him away, back to the bedroom to finish him. There was the torn table cloth, the curtains half pulled down. The murdered man had held on to them with the strength of despair.
But he had not been strong enough. He had been dragged back .... where? ... into the dining-room, of course. There was the bloody imprint on the white panel of the door, like a ghostly, accusing sign-post.
I half turned the door knob ... cautiously, so very, very cautiously ... Good Lord, what would I find? Suppose the assassin were still inside?
But no. That was impossible. The clerk must have seen him come and go.
Suddenly I straightened out. A thought came tome. Why ... the clerk had told me that Durand had left the hotel again half an hour ago. And suppose—though it was impossible—that both Durand and the murderer had entered the apartment without the clerk’s knowledge, how was it that he had heard nothing? People do not struggle silently for life and death.
What devil’s business was all this?
I opened the dining-room door. I walked inside. The room was in perfect order. Nobody had been there. Then I carefully investigated all the other rooms, including my own suite. There was no trace of murderer or murdered. Just the few telltale signs—the blood, the imprint of the hand, the disorder, the piece of torn brown silk, the ragged lock of gray hair.
If murder had happened, the assassin had come into the room by a way other than the main landing; and by the same way he had departed, carrying the corpse. And Durand was a huge, heavy, shapeless mass of fat, weighing easily two hundred and fifty pounds. By street? By courtyard? Impossible. That would presuppose the strength and the agility of a gorilla. And the street was full of people; the café in the courtyard had been crowded since before lunch time.
When, a few moments later, the police inspector came, he went rapidly and thoroughly over the apartment. The man knew his business. I asked him the same questions I had asked myself.
“Yes, yes,” he replied. “All very mysterious. Murders often are. But murder there has been. There is every indication. Now the clerk says that he has not seen Durand return here after he left for the second time, over half an hour ago. Nor has he seen anybody enter the suite. Very well. The only solution is that the clerk is either the murderer or an accomplice.”
I tried to argue with him. I had no reason to consider the clerk innocent. But, on the other hand, I could not think him guilty. He had not acted like a guilty man when he went through the rooms with me. Still, I guess the inspector did exactly what any other policeman would have done under the same circumstances.
He went off with the tearful, protesting clerk, asking me to see that nobody disturbed the room. There might be some clue, some valuable clue which he had overlooked. He would be back within the hour with two of his most trusted detectives.
When he had gone, I went to my own suite. But I did not stay there very long. For, casually stepping to the window, I saw the Galla medicine man at his usual post of observation, in the courtyard, looking up at our rooms.
I telephoned to the office, and asked them to send me up the headwaiter.
“Yes,” he said in answer to my question. “The negro has been there ever since noon. Is he annoying you, sir?”
“No, no. I just asked out of idle curiosity.”
“Very well, sir. Thank you, sir.”
He bowed and left.
Had the floor clerk, then, really acted under the Galla’s instructions, since it was clear that the Galla himself could not have committed the murder? I could not believe it. There was something about this whole affair which had escaped me so far, a vital spot, a solution, which whisked and wound itself through the mazes of this stark enigma like a thin, half-visible wire.
I returned to Durand’s bedroom. I tried to reconstruct the scene. He had returned to the hotel after leaving the races. He had felt fatigued and had lain down for a moment. There was the disordered bed as a witness.
I bent over it.
There was something about the bed which I did not like.
The pillows were rumpled. The sheet and cover were slashed. There was blood. All true enough.
But why did the knife cuts run from left to right, across the width of the bed, while the trail of blood extended the other way, from head to foot? It was reasonable to assume that, as wounds naturally follow the general direction of the knife thrusts which cause them, the drip of blood would run the same way. Also the blood spots centered in the middle of the bed, indicating injuries in the abdominal region. There was so much blood and so many knife slashes in that part of the bed that the murdered man, chiefly considering that he was fat and asthmatic, could not have had the giant strength and vitality to drag himself out of bed, and into the front room. He must have been practically disemboweled.
I looked more closely at the pillows. They were rumpled, as I said. But when I lifted them up, I noticed that the sheet which stretched beneath them to the head of the bed was perfectly straight and smooth. There were none of those wrinkles and creases and folds which the weight of a moving head on top of the pillows would naturally cause; even with a quiet sleeper, which Durand was not.
Another peculiar feature was that both sheet and cover were tightly stretched at the place where the sleeper’s legs must have been. Even if he had rested on top of the bed, Durand’s weight was such that the cover, tucked in at the foot, must have given way, or at least bulged in spots.
Closer and closer I bent over the bed. And suddenly it struck me that there wasn’t the slightest suspicion of the Black Lily scent about it. True: the maid changed the bed linen every morning. But Durand was so saturated with the beastly stuff that even a ten minutes’ rest would have left a vague trace of the odor on the pillows. But there was none. Absolutely none.
Then his words of the day before came back to me:
“If the perfume is not there, remember that I, myself, cannot have been there.”
Durand was not dead. Of a sudden I knew it. He had left the hotel, as the floor clerk had said. He had not returned. The old fox was playing ’possum. But why?
I had not long to search for the reason. It was down there in the courtyard. The Galla!
The thing was devilishly clever and simple. He wanted the police and everybody else to believe in the fact of his assassination. The papers would bring the news. The Galla would naturally hear of it, either through the German-speaking black, or via Freetown. He would return to Africa, satisfied that somebody else, some other blood-enemy of the old slave-trader, had done the job.
Violent anger overcame me.
So Durand had used me from the first. He had played with me to save his rotten, old carcass. The ungrateful old hound! I had been a fool. Like a greenhorn I had stood there and held the bag.
I could have strangled him then and there if he had been in distance of my hands. I called him every bad name I could think of. Why had I trusted him, since I knew his former record—the fat, egotistical old scoundrel—with his sagging lips, his sardonic eyes, his flapping, criminal ears ... the whole mass like a satyr shape with his tongue sticking out.
I should have made him pay for the service I had done him when I had him good and safe, when I...
But pardon me ... that’s another story.
Walking up and down in that luxurious suite of the Eden Hotel, I was mad, as mad as a hatter, to think that this man had given both me and the Galla the slip. And I had expected to make a meal-ticket and a small-expense account of that fat scoundrel which would last me for the rest of my life. Now, by Gad, I thought, he may even have left the hotel bill for me to settle.
I tell you I was angry.
Then there was a knock at the door. The bell-boy handed me a letter marked Rohrpost ... special delivery.
I opened it and crumpled the envelope into a ball which I threw into the waste-paper basket.
A piece of paper fell out, tightly closed with paste. I tore it open. There was a small handkerchief ... a woman’s handkerchief...
For a moment I was stupified. What sort of fool practical joke was this? Or had I unwittingly made a gallant conquest in Berlin? I looked at the handkerchief, to see if there were any initials which might give me a clue to the identity of the sender.
Then I gave a shout.
The handkerchief was saturated with Black Lily perfume. It came from Durand. It was a sign of life. He had not left me for good.
I remembered then the rest of his cryptic saying:
“If ever you miss me, follow the trail of my perfume.”
The message was clear, sharp. I felt elated. I apologized in the silence of my heart for all my black suspicions against the man.
Then a sobering thought came to me. How could I go all over Berlin, trailing him by the smell of his perfume? Preposterous, ridiculous. Berlin is rather a fair-sized block of real estate. A labor of Sisyphus. Quite impossible.
Then I remembered that Rohrpost letters can only be sent from a few postoffices, the number and situation of which would appear on the stamp cancelation. I fished the crumpled envelope out of the basket.
The answer was there. For the cancelation mark read:
“Post-Amt, 609, Berlin-Hundekehle.”
My next hour was an extremely busy one. I’m afraid that everybody with whom I came into contact thought me more or less crazy.
There was first the police inspector and his two satellite detectives. They came in a minute later, energetic, bustling, eager for clues and the sour smell of blood.
I stopped them at the door of the bedroom.
“Never mind, gentlemen.”
“But, Herr Fresne, we have to ...”
“Never mind,” I interrupted. “The thing is off. Release the clerk .... and here ... give him this...” I took a couple of hundred-mark notes out of my pocket, mentally charging them up to Durand. “Apologize to him if there should be a paragraph permitting that in your criminal code. Stop investigating the case. But publish the murder in the newspapers with all the gory details you can think of. See that the news is cabled to West Africa at once.”
I nearly burst out laughing to see the expression on that fellow’s face. To talk to him the way I had done ... to him a Kaiserlich Deutscher Beamter, an officer of the reserve, a sure-enough gentleman with a “von” in front of his name. Why, such conduct should be verboten!
But I was pretty sure of myself. I remembered the interview which Durand had had in the Wilhelm-Strasse. So I asked the inspector to ring up the Foreign Office. I told him what to say. He stared, glared, expostulated, but finally phoned. He talked for several minutes. The reply must have been satisfactory. I guess those chaps in the Wilhelm-Strasse thought they were being let off cheaply. God knows what dark secret Durand had held over their official and political heads. You know Liberia has always been a hotbed of European intrigue.
So the police inspector obeyed me to the letter.
I also asked him to lend me a police dog. I got that, too. It came half an hour later. It was a splendid animal; gentle, powerful, intelligent, keen; half Vosges bloodhound and half English mastiff.
Hundekehle, the place where the special delivery letter had been posed, is a suburb beyond Charlottenburg, at the outskirts of Halensee, and connecting the latter place with the Grunewald. It is a colony of charming villas, surrounded by deep, flaunting gardens, and inhabited by the financial élite of the German capital.
I took a taxi as far as the outskirts of the place. There I dismissed the driver and walked on, holding my dog securely on a leash.
I still blush at the recollection of the next half hour.
I am afraid the good people of Berlin must have thought me absolutely mad. They consider most Anglo-Saxons a trifle touched anyway. But the case is plain, beyond arguing, when a well dressed and not too bad-looking specimen of that race strolls on a mild spring evening through the tree-bordered avenues of their most select suburb, holding on a leash a dog of ferocious aspect which takes alternative sniffs at th gravel paths and at a delicate lady’s cambric handkerchief which said Anglo-Saxon holds in his hand.
People gave me a wide berth. Only some of the younger girls looked at me with a certain degree of sympathy. To them I was doubtless a young Lochinvar out of the West, who had hit on an up-to-date method of discovering his lost lady-love. I am sure they wished me success in my amorous quest.
I walked and walked and walked. No result. Finally, beyond a thick clump of pine trees, I saw a magnificent pile, thickly shrouded with gardens, and a deep black park.
I made for it, and as soon as we came within hailing distance, my dog gave lusty tongue.
He had found the trail of the Black Lily perfume.
Two minutes later, I was facing Durand, over a glass of Pol Roger.
His old negro butler whom I remembered from Freetown was hovering in the background. I asked him half a dozen questions. He laughed.
“But it is simplicity itself. I told you that I fear death. I knew that the Galla would kill me sooner or later. I know the telepathic sense of hearing these medicine men possess. So I could not speak to you about them. Nor could I write. A letter is never very safe. So I disappeared. I had it all mapped out before I left Freetown. Bought the villa while I was still there. Shipped most of my stuff, also my old butler, by the fast mail steamer. I faked the murder. I sent you the handkerchief with the perfume, thinking you would use the very same method of locating me which you actually have used. I was not afraid of sending the letter with the handkerchief. For even if an associate in the pay of these murderous Galla ju-ju men should intercept and open it, he would simply have thought it to be a love token from some woman. Now the papers will bring the news of my death, and, for the time being, I am safe.”
Then I asked one little question.
“But suppose those Gallas, who know you at least as intimately as I do, associate your personality with the Black Lily perfume just as I have done? Suppose they trail you by it? You know what wonderful power of scent they possess.”
Durand laughed. He patted the police dog with more affection than I would have thought possible in him.
“Oh, yes. I thought of that, too. If you will go down the corridor and turn to the left, you will come to my bedroom.”
“What of it?”
“Oh, nothing much. Only my old butler should be very busy just now throwing out every bit of my old Black Lily perfume.” He filled my glass, and offered his cigarette case. “You see, Johnny, I have decided to give Coty’s Red Jessamine a try for a change.”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1945, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 78 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse