Читать книгу Island of Point Nemo - Jean-Marie Blas de Robles - Страница 24
ОглавлениеLet us leave Holmes and Grimod to gather their thoughts and discuss the curious passengers on this ship of fools, and follow Canterel after he left his companions behind and passed through two cars to get back to his room.
As he entered the last hallway, he saw the little man with the blue glasses, who was trying to open the door to his compartment.
“Hey, you there!” called Martial. “Might I ask what you’re doing?”
“You can see very well,” the man responded with a very strong Belgian accent, “I’m trying to get into my cabin, but the key isn’t working . . .”
“What is your cabin number?”
“Car 6, Cabin 15.”
“This is Car 7 . . .”
The man apologized profusely, doffed his hat, and hurriedly decamped. This person certainly appeared nothing short of fishy, but in his defense, thought Canterel, the numbers of the cars were so poorly indicated that anyone would have trouble finding his way around.
Once in his room, Canterel undressed to take a shower. Although it was much less spacious than the one installed in his automobile, the bathroom he was using was roomy enough for proper ablutions with hot water, a luxury that seemed to him quite natural in a steam engine where soot always managed to grease up your skin. His sessions with the chest expanders and in the bicycle room had left him dazed; his shower perked him up without quieting his mind. As soon as he had donned evening wear, he opened the two panels of his travel pharmacy, a walnut-wood box containing numerous phials with glass stoppers; from the drawer at the bottom, he pulled what he called his “wine list,” a notebook where he meticulously recorded the medications he took and the effects he felt from them:
Sunday, February 10th. 17 hrs: 6 Phanodorms; 6 more around 1 hr 30 in the morning. Slept 4 hrs.
Monday the 11th. Rutonal at 4 hrs 30; 3 at 6 hrs. 18 total for 3 hrs of sleep.
Tuesday the 12th. 4 Soneryl at 17 hrs; 4 at 18 hrs 30; asleep at 22 hrs, then 13 during the night. Slept 12 hr 15, outward euphoria.
Wednesday the 13th. 1 bottle Neurinase, little effect.
Thursday the 14th. 20 Somnothyril; 1 bottle Neurinase, no lunch, euphoria all day.
Friday the 15th. Rutonal at 9 hr = 34. 3 hrs sleep, wonderful euphoria.
Saturday the 16th. 2 bottles Veronidin. Anxiety, little sleep. Muddled euphoria.
Reading this last page, he decided on fifteen Rutonal tablets, waiting to see what happened. Opium, alas, gave off too strong a smell in the car; other travelers had complained.
Seated at the corner of the bench, Canterel took out his chronograph and once again verified that the time did not correspond to the brightness outside. This whole train was catching up to time; or outrunning it, which amounted to the same thing in terms of the floating sensation that the phenomenon produced. Rather pleasant, he admitted, stowing the timepiece in his pocket, not to be brought back to the present until their arrival.
He had made his first big trip as a child, accompanied by his mother. An intellectual, recently widowed and so eccentric that she seemed English, Marguerite had decided one day that she could no longer do without taking a trip to the Indies. She had hired a yacht and crew, convinced a dozen friends to come with her, and set off for Cannes, with her head chef, her chambermaid, and the ebony casket in which she kept her dresses. After several weeks of pleasant cruising, this little world saw the port of Bombay on the horizon. The ship was only a few cable lengths away when his mother asked someone to pass her a pair of binoculars. She scanned the coast for a moment, twisted her mouth as if she had just heard a sour note at a concert, and turned to the captain.
“So this is the Indies!” she said, handing him the binoculars. “No use disembarking, Monsieur, give the order to turn around, please; we’re going back.”
The guests had expostulated against this folly, then grown angry; the yacht had tacked about and set a course for France. For the whole return voyage, his mother had stayed cloistered in her cabin, accepting the presence of only her son and, every evening from ten to midnight, her paid companion, who would read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to her.
Blood will tell, thought Canterel, setting his forearms down on the armrest that he had just hooked to the nickel bar of the luggage rack, a device shaped like a swing that allowed him to rest while maintaining decent posture. His face turned to the window, he watched the taiga pass by for a moment, then closed his eyes. The landscape, too, was a mental thing.
Three cars away, Lady MacRae missed nothing that passed the window she looked out of. Already dressed for the evening meal, she had taken a seat in the library lounge and was letting herself be rocked by the choppy motion of the train.
In the long curve that the train was following at that moment, the powerful locomotive could be seen moving toward the east, fleeing the night, as if frightened by the thick black smoke it spewed. Monotone hatching against the gray sky, firs and birches alternated with the hypnotic effect of a stroboscope.
Behind her, several travelers, mostly women, were making use of the amenities available to the passengers. Perfectly integrated into the luxurious setting of this paneled boudoir, several reading spinets produced a continuous humming sound, in harmony with the rhythm of the wheels on the rails. Seeing a place free up, Clawdia sat down at one of these machines; she settled into a still-warm chair in front of the glass triptych set in an old gold frame. Her feet worked the two pedals in a continuous motion, engaging the wheel and then the dynamo, which soon produced enough electricity to light the screen. Gloomily, she tapped out on the ivory keyboard an “adventure” code that soon produced a list of possible options. From among the suggested titles, she chose Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, and activated the boxwood pull-tabs to confirm her choice. The device got right to the point: on the middle screen she could see the text of the last chapter, in which readers finally witness the hunt for the accursed whale, while one of the two panels that framed it displayed quavering but coordinated excerpts from the John Huston film with Gregory Peck, and the other showed the wrongs done to these poor creatures by the fishing industry. Caught up in the images, more than the text, Clawdia let herself be swept away by the scene, in which the whalers pursued the wounded monster.
“Heave, heave, me hearties!” yelled Stubb, with his bonny Irish face that looked like it had been carved with an ax, as the chalky mass of the sperm whale made its way through the gray swell.
When Queequeg jabbed in his harpoon, then Daggoo, then Tashtego, she thought she could feel the blades plunge into her as they went into the beast’s flank, the feeling was so strong that she had to hold back a whimper; caught up in trying to contain herself, she nonetheless heard a scream rise up in the library.
It was the wagon’s babushka, her eyes full of horror, who was pointing at Clawdia, gesturing at something behind her back. Clawdia turned around and could not stifle her own cry: hung by its feet outside the car, a woman’s naked body was swinging outside the window, her face and dangling arms smearing the glass with wide, bloody streaks.
Informed of the incident, two conductors climbed onto the roof to untie the poor woman and bring her body back inside the train. Holmes and Grimod, drawn by the noise that all this commotion was making, appeared at just the right moment to lend a hand; it was not hard for them to help move the body to a service compartment, far from the eyes of the passengers. As they laid the dead woman out on a bench, they were sorry to recognize Yva, the pretty waitress, whose charms Holmes stopped contemplating from that moment forward. The young woman’s ears had been cut off, her breasts and stomach slashed with a razor along the contours of her tattoo; her throat was slit open. A harrowing detail—Yva’s pubic hair had been torn out with such violence that it had left bruises, as if she had been skinned by an inept butcher.
At this last finding, Holmes and Grimod exchanged a quick look; in a less tragic situation, one would have glimpsed in this exchange, in spite of everything, the depth of their terror.
“Thank you, Messieurs,” said one of the conductors, pulling a cover over the body. “We’ll take it from here.”
The two men joined Lady MacRae and, refusing to respond to the other passengers’ questions, hurried to Canterel’s cabin. After waking him from his slumber, Holmes began to tell him of the drama that had just taken place. When he reached the most intimate of the abuses suffered by the young woman, Canterel cursed.
“Great Scott!” he said, knitting his brows. “The Noh Straddler!”
“Yes,” Grimod confirmed. “It’s his mark.”
“Who are you talking about?” asked Clawdia.
“The most sinister of assassins,” said Holmes in a low voice. “No one has ever seen his face, but there is not a heinous crime, not a bankruptcy, not a famous con that does not involve his name being spoken at one point or another.”
“Or rather his nickname,” said Canterel, “since no one knows his true identity. On the rare occasions that anyone has glimpsed him, he has been seen straddling his victim, standing still over of her in an affected pose, like an actor in Noh theater, then grabbing at her crotch to yank out her pubic hair. He decorates the places he visits with these awful trophies. In the only cache that he didn’t have time to remove before disappearing, the police also found masks fashioned from human faces . . .”
“And, God forgive me,” continued Holmes, “a copy of The Tarot as Guide to the World bound in the skin of human breasts!”
“What a monster!” said Clawdia, shivering.
“Yes,” Holmes said pensively. “At least now we know who our adversary is.”
“Martial,” Grimod interrupted, “could someone have noticed that you talked privately with Yva, maybe even imagining that she could have given you some kind of information?”
Canterel gathered his thoughts, then remembered the man in the blue glasses: he was the only person who had seen him come out of the bathroom where the young waitress was finishing getting dressed.
“Then we must begin with him. Here’s what I propose . . .”
