Даргер и Довесок - [13]

“You!” She advanced wrathfully on her husband. “How dare you object to my taking a lover? How dare you!”

“You…you were…” The little man looked bewildered by her presence.

“I couldn’t get what I need at home. It was only natural that I should look for it elsewhere. So it costs you a day of your life every time we make love! Aren’t I worth it? So it costs you three days to tie me up and whip me! So what? Most men would die for the privilege.”

She pressed the gun into his hands.

“If I mean so little to you,” she cried histrionically, “then kill me!” She darted back and struck a melodramatic pose alongside Darger. “I will die beside the man I love!”

“Yes…” Belated comprehension dawned upon Monsieur’s face, followed closely by a cruel smile. “The man you love.”

He pointed the pistol at Darger and pulled the trigger.

But in that same instant, Mignonette flung herself before her lover, as if to shelter his body with her own. In the confines of so small a room, the gun’s report was world-shattering. She spun around, clutched her bosom, and collapsed in the bedroom doorway. Blood seeped onto the carpet from beneath her.

Monsieur held up the gun and stared at it with an expression of total disbelief.

It went off again.

He collapsed dead upon the carpet. 

* * *

The police naturally suspected the worst. But a dispassionate exposition of events by the Dedicated Doctor, a creature compulsively incapable of lying, and an unobtrusive transfer of banknotes from Surplus allayed all suspicions. Monsieur d’Etranger’s death was obviously an accident d’amour, and Darger and Surplus but innocent bystanders. With heartfelt expressions of condolence, the officers left.

When the morticians came to take away Monsieur’s body, the Dedicated Doctor smiled. “What a horrible little man he was!” he exclaimed. “You cannot imagine what a relief it is to no longer give a damn about his health.” He had signed death warrants for both Monsieur and his widow, though his examination of her had been cursory at best. He hadn’t even touched the body.

Darger roused himself from his depressed state to ask, “Will you be returning for Madame d’Etranger’s body?”

“No,” the Dedicated Doctor said. “She is a cat, and therefore the disposition of her corpse is a matter for the department of sanitation.”

Darger turned an ashen white. But Surplus deftly stepped beside him and seized the man’s wrists in his own powerful paws. “Consider how tenuous our position is here,” he murmured. Then the door closed, and they were alone again. “Anyway — what body?”

Darger whirled. Mignonette was gone. 

* * *

“Between the money I had to slip to les flics in order to get them to leave as quickly as they did,” Surplus told his morose companion, “and the legitimate claims of our creditors, we are only slightly better off than we were when we first arrived in Paris.”

This news roused Darger from his funk. “You have paid off our creditors? That is extremely good to hear. Wherever did you get that sort of money?”

“Ci, Ça, and l’Autre. They wished to be bribed. So I let them buy shares in the salvage enterprise at a greatly reduced rate. You cannot imagine how grateful they were.”

It was evening, and the two associates were taking a last slow stroll along the luminous banks of the Seine. They were scheduled to depart the city within the hour via river-barge, and their emotions were decidedly mixed. No man leaves Paris entirely happily.

They came to a stone bridge, and walked halfway across it. Below, they could see their barge awaiting them. Darger opened his Gladstone and took out the chrome pistol that had been so central in recent events. He placed it on the rail. “Talk,” he said.

The gun said nothing.

He nudged it ever so slightly with one fmger. “It would take but a flick of the wrist to send you to the bottom of the river. I don’t know if you’d rust, but I am certain you cannot swim.”

“All right, all right!” the pistol said. “How did you know?”

“Monsieur had possession of an extremely rare chapbook which gave away our scheme. He can only have gotten it from one of Mignonette’s book scouts. Yet there was no way she could have known of its importance—unless she had somehow planted a spy in our midst. That first night, when she broke into our rooms, I heard voices. It is obvious now that she was talking with you.”

“You are a more intelligent man than you appear.”

“I’ll take that for a compliment. Now tell me — what was this ridiculous charade all about?”

“How much do you know already?”

“The first bullet you fired lodged in the back wall of the bedroom. It did not come anywhere near Mignonette. The blood that leaked from under her body was bull’s blood, released from a small leather bladder she left behind her. After the police departed, she unobtrusively slipped out the bedroom window. Doubtless she is a great distance away by now I know all that occurred. What I do not understand is why.”

“Very well. Monsieur was a vile old man. He did not deserve a beautiful creature like Mignonette.”

“On this we are as one. Go on.”