The Waxworks Murder

The place is no longer a theatre, though the red-curtained stage glitters with miniature revues. It is chiefly waxed dance-floor and gaudy decorations, with spotlights from the gallery tearing blue and white holes in a mist of tobacco smoke. Now it shrieked and pounded to the contortions of a Negro jazz-band, dominated by cymbals, bass-drum, and hideous brassy wails like the howling of cats. It is, I believe, designated as hot. Just why, I have never been able to understand, unless it is to be deduced from the sweating ecstasy of the players. But then an appreciation of the Negro's artistry, including his spirituals, has been denied me entirely; so I can only report that the rafters trembled, the floor shook to pounding feet, dust tickled the spotlights, every bottle rattled in the bar, a whirl of cries pulsed up from the jigging dancers; and I sat down in a loge beside the dance-floor and ordered a bottle of champagne.

The hands of my watch crawled. It grew hotter, more crowded and smoky. Cries became squeals; an Argentine band set the dancers jerking with the stamp of the tango; more ladies of the evening slid off their stools at the bar and drifted past the loges with a tentative roving eye. With every tick of the watch, I was drawing closer to the time for leaving. ... Then, when the lights dimmed and the chatter died to a hum, they announced Estelle. Just before the place became dark, I noticed a man sitting in one of the boxes far across the dance-floor. It was Captain Chaumont. He sat motionless, his elbows on the rail, staring at the stage....

In a darkness thick with heat and the smell of powder, a white spotlight found Estelle standing against scarlet curtains. She wore white, with a head-dress of pearls. I was too far away to catch the expression of her face, but I envisaged the blue-eyed girl with the haunted face, pink lips, and husky voice, whose voluptuous figure had that afternoon subtly transformed the house on the Boulevard des Invalides. And even now you could feel the moist brilliance of her eyes moving over the audience. The contact between them was vital, sultry, intense, making the throat dry. It had something of the crackle of electricity; it spread out across the hall in warm streams, leaving, in the electrical silence, only a dim, vast creaking, an enormous murmur as of strained breaths, which was the hall's reply. The violins had wandered into a dreaming melody, deepening and throbbing....

The girl could sing! That caress of her voice could touch your every nerve; it woke old sorrows; it made you remember pain and pity and compassion. She sang with the abandon of Mistinguett, the smouldering carelessness of Meller, dropping words as contemptuously as ashes flicked off a cigarette. But in billing her as an American singer they were stark mad. Hers were the love-songs of old Paris, whose rhythms suggest brooding as much as love. They suggest bruises and the gutter; cellars, ecstasy, and the cold rain. Grief cries out in the cunning violins and the sudden break of the husky voice. Grief jabs the heart like a dull knife, just failing to pierce. As the last soaring notes shivered and dropped, and Gina Prevost's body relaxed in a shudder, I almost knocked over my chair in rising. I wanted to get out under cover of the applause which came in furious gusts across the hall; and I found that my hands were trembling. I thrust some banknotes at a waiter, pushing my way out in the dark. Still I could hear the roar beating those rafters, the waves of handclapping which spurted up, died, and spurted again. In a daze I retrieved hat and coat.

I wondered how Chaumont had taken it. I wondered, too, how much of her own terror cried out in her songs; whether her knees shook now, as she faced the acclaim limply. There were depths to this woman which you would not have suspected from this morning; you could go mad over the bitter lure of her eyes, or the sulkiness of her full, fleshy mouth. 'O mystical rose of the mire - !' A blast of cold air struck me as I went down to the street, and I saw dimly the car-starter raising a white-gloved hand for a taxi. Across the memory of her struck Bencolin's words: 'Take a taxi there, as Galant did, and time yourself when you go to the club.' Galant's alibi. ...

Mechanically I raised my eyes to look across the street. I saw a dingy jeweller's shop, in whose window was the illuminated face of a clock whose hands pointed to five minutes past eleven. I got into the cab, said 'To the Porte Saint-Martin, quickly,' and compared my own watch with the clock as the taxi driver slammed. Five minutes past.

'Quickly,' one syllable spoken to a Parisian taxi-driver, is a potent word. In the very stoop of the man's shoulders, in the terrific jerk with which we shot backwards and then wheeled to plunge bumping down the rue Fontaine, I knew what to expect. I was lifted and hurled from one side to the other as the shop-fronts whirled past. But the real adventure drummed in my pulses now. The taxi windows rattled wildly, die springs joked and banged, and I struck up a French drinking-song in which the driver shortly joined. When at last we spun round into the Boulevard Poissioniere, I looked at my watch again. Nine minutes, even at this pace, and a good twelve before we reached the Porte Saint-Martin. Oh, yes, Galant's alibi checked. It checked, if anything, too well.

My throat grew a little dry as I walked down the Boulevard de Sebastopol, and my legs had a curious lightness. Beyond the flare of lights at the corner, the boulevard was murky. There were a few loungers at the dim- lit entrance to a cinema, and they all seemed to be watching me. Here was the door, in deep shadow. I did not suppose there would be anybody lurking there, but I braced myself lest I should bump into someone. It was not until I fished in my pocket for the silver key that I realized my fingers were a trifle unsteady. I inserted the key, which opened the door easily and without a sound.

The damp stuffiness of the passage blew over me. It was absolutely dark, but the whole place seemed to smell of murder. Green-lit ghosts would not be standing there halfway down, one with a knife in its hand and its head turned sideways, and yet it was not pleasant to fancy them. Not a sound, either. I wondered if old Augustin were pottering about his museum. Now, then. Were guests in the habit of turning on the passage lights, those concealed ones worked from the switch beside the door, as they entered? Probably, because you could see nothing whatever when the door had clicked shut behind. They could be extinguished, in all likelihood, from another switch inside the club itself. I pressed the button.

The moonlight glow from among the rafters showed the stone-flagged floor. In one place, just opposite the museum door, it had been significantly scrubbed, and the clean splotch stood out even more suggestively than the bloodstain. Damn it! there ought to be noise ! My own footfalls echoed as I walked towards the rear, fastening on my mask. The mask set the seal on it all. Instinctively I glanced at the museum door, which was closed. My imagination moved out through the green grottos of the place, to that garish entrance with the 'A' set in electric lights in the roof. It would be almost deserted. But Mile Augustin would be still seated in the little glass booth there, dressed sombrely in black, with the roll of blue tickets at her elbow and the money-till under her hands - those strong, white, capable hands. Very probably a crowd of the morbid had thronged the museum that day, and she was tired. What was she thinking behind her inscrutable eyes? What ? ...

Somebody was trying the knob of the museum door. I had been staring at it as I walked down the passage; but now, for the first time, I saw in dim light that the knob was being turned softy, backwards and forwards.   v

Nothing is quite so fraught with terror at night as the thin creak of a knob in silence. For a second I wondered whether to wait. No; it was ridiculous to suppose that this might be the murderer. Some club member, merely. ... Well, then, why didn't the person open the door? Why stand there softly working the handle, as though indecisive? But I could not wait. There must be no suspicion. Settling my mask firmly, I went on towards that other door at the right of the passage.

When I put my key into the other lock, sudden images shot through my head. Images of evil and danger, of being shut into a doorless box with Galant's red nose and the soft cat's purr of his voice. Too late now! I was pushing open the door.

At the same moment I opened it, the corridor light was extinguished behind me; it must work automatically. I was in the foyer of the club, I tried to look unconcerned beneath my mask, and to remember exactly the downstairs plan. ... It was a spacious hall, some twenty feet high, with blue-veined marble pillars set in a floor of blue-and-gold mosaic tiles. The light, emanating in pale wreaths from the tops of the pillars, left the lower part of the hall in twilight. At the left side I saw a cloakroom, and far at the right an arched doorway ornamented with Cupids in a heavy Edwardian style. That (I remembered from the plan) led to the lounge. From behind it drifted a rustle as of many people on deep rugs, a hint of laughter, and the subdued murmur of an orchestra. The air was thick, powder- scented. And the very atmosphere of this luxury hidden behind blank walls, in a dingy street, dulled one's reason while it conjured up exotic images in the brain like bright, poisonous orchids. To the nerves it lent stimulation - abandon, a tingle of danger as at a mad dance, and a contraction of the heart as you visualized....

I started. Figures, gigantic in the dim light, were bearing down on me, making scarcely a sound on the glittering mosaic floor. Guards! I had to pass scrutiny now, from these people who appeared from nowhere. 'Your key, monsieur?' said a voice. They wore correct evening clothes, and white masks. But uniformly there was a bulge under the left armpit where the holster was buckled. (They were squat 44's. Bencolin had told me, and they were