The trail of the Squid

Front matter

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Chapter I

Clara Hope was in Paris with no other object than to find some trace of her employer, Ferris McClue. It was the evening of March 17, the festival of mi* careme, or mid-lent, and the ancient carousal known as the bal des Tapettes was being revived in at least a dozen different quarters after a half-century of neg¬ lect. All Paris, in other words, was preparing to dance and to make a night of it.

But Clara did not know this. She only knew that The Ferret, who had left her alone in charge of his New York office more than a year ago, no longer an¬ swered either letters or cablegrams or gave any other sign of continued existence. Beyond question some¬ thing serious had happened. Yes, but what? That was the problem which she had set herself to solve.

Outwardly few women could have looked less fitted for the task. She was still to all appearance that plump little Puritan, just beginning to be a bit old-maidish in her ideas but not so far gone as to be altogether contented with the lot of school-teacher in a New England country town, who had answered his adver¬ tisement for a book-keeper at the beginning of their joint career.

In his office, giving herself conscientiously to the work, she had progressed wonderfully, learned in a short time all that could be taught of the technic of crime detection practiced on a modern and magificent scale, and seen her whole existence fill with the crude material of excitement. Once or twice, face to face with violence and death, she had risen to heights of devotion only to be explained by love. Yet, although she had promised McClue that she would marry him, she had never been able to overcome a certain innate distaste for his profession. Her idea of marriage was that of a haven where one might be at peace and thor¬ oughly conventional; and whenever there was an in¬ terval of calm at the agency she showed an unmistak¬ able tendency to revert to the school-marm, having always failed utterly to find that delight in adventure for adventure’s sake which had led The Ferret to much of his success.

ii

Once, at the end of a perilous voyage to the South Seas, they were actually on the point of taking out a marriage license, when another taxi running into theirs had hurled her into temporary invalidism. Upon her recovery, she looked back upon the accident almost as an escape. Perhaps she was still suffering from shock. Certainly marriage no longer appealed to her. And when McClue, fired with the ambition to track a notorious criminal, expressed a desire to go to Europe, she rather exaggerated the vague weakness which con¬ tinued to cling about her, and thus managed to get herself left behind.

It was after his departure, when the letters she duti¬ fully wrote to the absentee suddenly ceased to bring responses, that a new Clara rose, so to speak, like a Phenix from the ashes of the old. No mere estrange¬ ment confronted her, for McClue did not answer even business communications. Something inimical,' subtle and daring had enveloped him, swallowed him up. And with the conviction of this fact came that flair, that eagerness in the pursuit of clues which for¬ merly had been The Ferrets alone. She developed something like clairvoyance, and though she had noth¬ ing to go upon save his last report—to the effect that the man he sought had been all but in his handsi only to slip through them and disappear—she was troubled by no doubhts as to the general course to be followed.

He had been about to start for Avignon, but no evi¬ dence existed that he had ever reached there. Better begin, then, in Paris, where he was known to have lived. The only other clue, if clue it could be called, was a passage in his last letter, wherein he had play¬ fully described the enemy as “a human squid, with tentacles everywhere but whose head keeps out of the way.” Little enough, in all conscience. But she did not despair. She was in Paris, and somewhere about her lay the trail she sought.

Letting herself drift with the crowds, she crossed the Seine to the Latin Quarter and passed up the famous boulevard St. Michel to where from a simple wooden archway the name “Bouiller” in electric lights shone invitingly upon a knot of masks already seeking admittance.

“What is it?” she asked in bookish French of the men behind the ticket window.

“All night ball, Miss,” he grinned, shoving forward a bit of pasteboard.

By dint of following the line of least resistance, she had come to the very center of the night’s doings—a much-advertised entertainment that was being put on by the united efforts of the painters, sculptors, writers and musicians of the neighborhood, and promising to rival in its extravagance one of those scandalous and now almost forgotten fetes des fous of the Middle Ages.

In this same direction, had she but known it, two men almost completely enveloped in black dominoes were being driven in a rapid motor-car which an ini¬ tiate would have recognized as belonging to the police. The elder of these, a gray-headed figure with twin¬ kling eyes and a restless, squirrel-like activity in all his movements, looked out of place in an official vehicle. No casual observer would have dreamed that he was a magistrate, and indeed Tardieu’s connection with the Parquet had often been criticized. Yet there was an air of whimsical honesty about the judge and a certain ease in bearing, indicative of ability so long unquestioned that it could afford to dispense with dignity.

“You should remember the two canons of Evreux,” he was saying to his companion. “Both were hanged from the belfry of their cathedral for trying to sup¬ press the follies of the carnival”

Victor Balai, a much younger man, shrugged his shoulders as high as was permitted by the respect due to a juge d’instruction from one who was merely at

the head of the Police Judiciare.

“I suppose that’s some eighteenth century prece¬ dent,” he ventured.

“Seventeenth,” corrected Tardieu. “But don’t think I’m altogether out of touch with the things of the twentieth. I’d like to stop this ball tonight as much as you would. Some remedies, however, are worse than the disease. And just because balai means broom and you happen to be a new one, I wouldn’t try to sweep everything clean if I were you—not, at least, until I was tired of being in office.”

“Oh, I shan’t do anything,” snapped the chief. “An¬ other outrage to public morals, more or less, counts for nothing these days.”

“We’re lucky, Balai, if we get off with that. Do you recall what is said to have happened at the festival of Santa Maria della Salute at Venice last fall? And at the public games at Cassis before that? It looks to me as if a new sort of Jack VEventeur had made his appearance in Europe.”

The other turned in surprise.

“They were murders, you think?”

“I’m sure of it, official reports to the contrary not¬ withstanding.”

“Even so, they’ve nothing to do with us.”

IS

“I hope not, Balai, I hope not. You’re afraid of an orgy. I’m afraid of a crowd. But here we are. Heaven send that nothing happens to put us both in the right.”

They drew their hoods hastily over their heads and faces, descended from the car, and with the careful steps of men unaccustomed to having their vision limited to what could be seen from eye-holes, made their way to the entrance of the Bouiller estab¬ lishment. There they presented ordinary tickets and were admitted without their identities having been disclosed.

A little earlier that same evening, the coming ball was being discussed in an unnoticed corner of a promiscuous resort known as the Cafe de la Rotonde, at the junction of the boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse, by a pair of worthies of a different sort.

“You don’t mean,” said one—a slender youth, fas¬ tidiously dressed and with over-white hands, “you don’t mean that you won’t be there?”

The other wagged his heavy beard disdainfully, letting his long black hair trace yet another infinites¬ imal streak of grease upon the hunched-up folds of his velveteen coat.

“Not if my name continues to be Flamand Bee.

X 6 THE TRAIL OF THE SQUID

SccUrats! Poseurs! What should I do at their ball? You like that sort of thing, Haquenee. As for me, I’d prefer to see them all hanged—in place of their pic¬ tures at the next salon.”

“You’e a savage,” smiled he of the pale hands, giv¬ ing a squint at his elegant self in one of the mirrors which covered the walls. “Now I’m glad to mix with these people. Makes me feel as if I was coming up in the world.”

“And they make me feel as if I had come down.”

“Yes, that’s what’s the matter with you, mon vieux. But I’ve got an extra ticket. Stick it into your pocket and forget that the Academy is sour grapes.”

“The Academy?”

Bee swore furiously beneath his breath, shoved the proffered entrance-slip away from him, thrust a hand deep into his trousers and brought out a crumpled bunch of hundred-franc notes.

“If you think it’s poverty that keeps me away from those dancing apes, what do you say to this?”

Haquenee, or La Haquende as he was more fre¬ quently called, regarded the unexpected sight of money with narrowing eyes.

“You’ve sold a picture—or I was never an apache!”

“That’s likely,” the other growled, tossing the notes contemptuously to the floor—from which a passing waiter, thinking the motion accidental, hastened to re¬ store them to his hand.

La Haquenee’s eyes grew narrower still, and across his face swept a look—keen, cold, sinister.

“Copain” he whispered, “I always suspected that you were one of us. But what’s the lay?”

Bee threw back his head and laughed.

“You’re a bien joli canaille, aren’t you, with your petty hates and scrimmages? Here, take this stuff if you don’t really care where such things come from. But before you call me comrade-”

“I’d better make sure you aren’t the devil in per¬ son, eh?”

Haquenee refused the money and veiled his glance of speculative curiosity in an amiable looking grin. “I know how to interest you in the ball, though. La Gadelle will be there—and I’ve seen you watching her in the Bois.”

“Why not? The most beautiful woman in Paris— anyone might watch her. But she has bought a villa at Nimes, and is going to marry Julien Ferrard and live like Maupassant’s Corsican lovers—or those in ‘Moonlight.’ She’ll no more be at les Tapettes than I will.”

“There you’re wrong. It’s Ferrard’s idea, I understand. They’re being given a dinner somewhere and are going afterwards.”

“Bah! Do you know these people?”

“No more than you do. Only—a cat may look at a king.”

“Then let me tell you something. Ferrard is lame, and he’ll never paint anything. But he isn’t such a fool as to lead the Red Currant back to that gang.”

“Oh- 6 ! Rougette!”

La Haquenee lifted his voice at the sight of a very young woman with a head of beautiful auburn hair rioting from beneath a cheap knitted cap, who was passing at the farther end of the salle.

She paused, nodded carelessly, then caught sight of Bee and pushed her way through the gay, chattering, cigarette-smoking crowd, which, unable to find enough tables, overflowed the aisles and gave to the place an atmosphere of animated suffocation.

“Flamand says that Silva Jonquille won’t be at the ball. He has murdered a tourist, or something, and has francs to throw to the dogs. But he pretends he’s going to spend the evening here.”

“She’ll surely be at the ball,” responded Rougette, leaning towards long-beard and displaying a figure with that slender, cat-like grace seldom found even in Paris except among the artists’ models. “I’m going to her farewell dinner now. It’s at l’Estrange’s. And I’m starred in the pageant at the Bouiller after¬ wards. It’s to be quite shock-ing, like before the war.”

At her mincing pronunciation of the English word, sounding like a snake’s hiss in the midst of her liquid, Latin Quarter prattle, Bee frowned. But he nodded at the same time.

“In that case, I’ll go.”

“A bientot, alors ”

“How soon?”

“Midnight. Don’t be late if you want to see the surprise.”

“So, there are two red-heads in this affair,” observed La Haquenee as the girl turned away. “Which one do you go to see? Dame! I believe this one would like to be your little cabbage.”

“Va t’en!” mumbled Bee in his beard. “Get out of here before I put you out. But—leave me that ticket. I mightn’t be able to get another.”

And having thus parted with the apache, who showed not the least offense, he pocketed the erstwhile despised bit of paper and gave the whole of his out¬ ward attention to the ordering and consumption of a second absinthe sucree.

On the left bank of the Seine, ten years is an eternity. So Silva Jonquille, whose gorgeous locks of chatain clair had won for her the name of La Gadelle, or Red Currant, had long since ceased to pass for any¬ thing less than pure Parisienne. She never talked about her beginnings, but it was generally understood that she had risen from the depths. Some even pre¬ tended that she had been found in a Paris gutter, a half-naked child whom a wandering beggar picked up to collect sous while he posed as her father and played the guitar. Others thought to identify her as a figur¬ ante snatched from some boite of a theater on Mont¬ martre and launched in society to please the whim of a protector, who, out of pure caprice, preferred to re¬ main in the background.

It was true—part of it—in spirit if not in detail. Silva had certainly experienced vicissitudes. She had been hungry, and knew what it was to be in danger of arrest for stealing bread. Filled with the will to live, she had climbed by whatever rungs fate offered, seizing upon anything, rejecting nothing—unless, per¬ haps, the most obvious thing of all. The hidden pro¬ tector was a myth.

In fact, for several years now she had owed her position, her toilets, her salon and her private motor¬ car to her own extraordinary skill in reproducing the patterns of famous Gobelin tapestries. In the back of her luxurious apartment was a big, unfurnished room where she worked every morning. But she hid it like a guilty secret, chosing to pose before the world as a butterfly.

It was a world peculiar to Paris, gay, elegant, and a sham. People having a vogue rather than a reputatiori made the bulk of it. There were always new faces there, taking the places of those that had disappeared and making a circle whose apparent stability was due, like the rainbows, to the momentary splendor of myriads of rapidly falling particles. In such a milieu no real acquaintances are made—which is the reason, possibly, why it was never guessed that she, its undis¬ puted queen, outwardly more madly frivolous than the rest, was American by birth, half American by blood, the daughter of a comfortable and eminently respectable home on the outskirts of Salem, Massa¬ chusetts.

Julien Ferrard, her fiance, gave as little promise of stability as the others. Clever—that was the word usually used to describe him—a man of talent whose industry and staying-powers were yet to be proven.

I’Estrange, on the contrary, was a personage. Some of the noblest families in Provence recognized him as a kinsman, and he had already achieved a conspicuous position among the artists of his time. This double advantage enabled him to mingle the upper and lower halves of society with a lordly and generous careless¬ ness. Dipping into Silva’s circle as into many others, always taking the best, his mansion in the old faubourg St. Germain excluded nobody who could boast personal superiority of any sort, and the invites to La Gadelle’s farewell dinner included not only Rougette, the model, but the Duchess de Fayves and the Countess de Montfayat. And the countess was actually present—a mar¬ vel of French republicanism at which the Anglo-Saxon can only gasp.

It was a distinct promotion for La Gadelle, for not¬ withstanding l’Estrange’s contempt for conventions, his approval was like an accolade and gave a certain char¬ acter of authenticity to any reputation upon which it fell. She might have been expected to show some sense of satisfaction. On the contrary, it was noticed all during the dinner that she seemed in less than her usual spirits. Was it coming home to her, now when it was too late, that Julien was an encumbrance, and that she was preparing to turn her back upon Paris just when new doors were opening before her? Ques¬ tions which were certainly asked, but not answered. And at the earliest possible moment she gave the other guests an additional subject for conversation by quietly disappearing from their midst.

In front of the mansion was a paved courtyard with a fountain, a number of century-old trees and a great wall rising to shut off any vulgar curiosity which might exist in the street. Here her host found her seated upon a moss-grown bench and gazing absently at the mass of vines which hung over the house-front like a theater curtain.

“Meditating mischief!” he laughed, seating himself beside her. “We’re going to be treated to one of the Red Currant’s famous pranks.”

“Jacques,” she broke out impulsively, “don’t let’s pretend. It hurts—this send-off tonight—and you know it.”

“Why, I thought-”

“You thought it would hurt less than the one I was likely to have if you didn’t interfere. And you’re right. But I don’t belong here. I was never a naked gamin dancing in the streets, but I’ve been worse things. Rich foreigners, gamblers, younger sons with¬ out morals or real brains—they are my sort of people.”

“On the contrary,” he contradicted, in his most in¬ cisive French, “they are merely the people you persist in going with.”

“I have my reasons. It doesn’t matter how I behave among them, and they help me to get dizzy.”

“Is that what you are after?”

“It’s what I’ve got to have.”

“And yet you’re planning for a nest in the country. Paul Fort, I understand, is already writing a pastoral about you, with Julien-”

“It’s on Julien’s account that I’m going. But what if he doesn’t like it, Jacques? He insists on our wind¬ ing up tonight with the bal des Tapettes. That’s what worries me.”

“I knew there was something. But why?”

“Because I love him, if you want to know. I want him—his weakness, his strength, everything—just for myself. At the ball he’ll drink absinthe, and make me jealous. I’ve been ruining him.”

She rose, stretching her arms out towards the trees through which the moonlight was just beginning to sift.

“I want him in a place like this,” she added softly. “I’ve never had anything to care for all my life—except a parrot, once, when I was a little girl.”

“A parrot?”

“Yes. And I lost that.”

L’Estrange regarded her attentively, but whether in simple enjoyment of the picture she made, or in an attempt to read the depths of her soul it would have been difficult to say. Certainly the picture was excuse enough. Her gown, of a tawny shade in the daytime, showed pure white in the moonlight, giving her the look of a statue. Her features, however, were far too expressive for marble—the dark brown eyes especially, with a disturbing yellow glint visible in them even now. There was something of the same tigerish quality about her hair, hanging loosely caught in carefully calcu¬ lated negligee about her shoulders—that too abundant hair of chatain clair .

“Sometimes I feel as if I were two persons,” she said, abruptly returning to her place. “Julien—he should be careful of me. I don’t understand the feel¬ ings that come to me sometimes. I must certainly bury myself in the country. It’s the only salvation for either of us. Love is what I’ve needed. And if love fails me-”

“Stop it!” protested l’Estrange in the tone of a physician addressing a hysterical patient.

But he was arrested by a stream of light coming through an opened door.

“Silva! You little cat, where are you?” called a voice, as a young man, limping slightly yet showing abundant vigor in all his movements, came down the house steps into the yard.

It was Julien Ferrard, dressed in conventional eve¬ ning clothes save for a soft felt hat that was perched jauntily on one side of his head.

“Oh, there you are!” he went on, catching sight of her. “I’ve a surprise. Rougette has asked me to take part with her in the grande entree at the Bouiller. I’m to be—but that’s the surprise.

“Hello, l’Estrange. I was looking for you, too. Will you please see that Silva gets there in time? Say a little after eleven-thirty. I must run right off and dress.”

Silva got up and took hold of the lapels of her lover’s coat, as if to adjust them but in reality to look into his eyes. He was laboring under considerable excite¬ ment, there could be no doubt of that.

“What a boy!” she exclaimed when he had gone. “See how stirred up he is at the prospect of being in a tableau.”

“Yes, a tableau with Rougette Picot, one of my—one of everybody’s models.”

“There, I knew it! You don’t like Julien.”

“Do you?” The painter turned suddenly to face her. “Do you really think he is worth all this?”

“Ah, you don’t mean that, you can’t! But you see I had reason when I said that I dreaded the ball.”

What would she have said could she have known what was to happen there? What did she say? That was a question which came to engage all Paris for many and many a day.

Chapter II

A hall, prodigiously long and wide in proportion to its height, with a gallery running along beneath the eaves of a peaked, open-timbered roof—these are the ordinary features of the interior of the Bouiller danc¬ ing-establishment. But on the night of the bal des Tapettes, a cone-shaped pavilion of stalls, or boxes, rose in the center of the floor space. Boxes on a slightly raised platform also bordered the walls; and behind them, masked by gorgeous curtains, numerous narrow and complicated passages led to refreshmentrooms, booths, privacy and all the accommodations necessary for the housing of a combined Saturnalia and fair.

What first struck the eye was the profusion of ban¬ ners, wreaths and colored paper lanterns, the banks of massed spectators and the whirling mob of capri¬ ciously costumed merry-makers, which, at eleven o’clock, already had possession of the floor. Electric

globes—here white, there green or red, added to the general sense of dazzling confusion and made it diffi¬ cult for the mind to grasp any details.

From behind artificial palms at either end of the ball, jazz bands were playing—one a tango and the other an old-fashioned hesitation waltz. The warring strains met and mingled in the neighborhood of the pa¬ vilion, where they were half drowned by laughter and the babble of voices. The time of the grande entree of the official hosts of the evening not having yet arrived, the world in general and its nether hemi¬ sphere in particular were making the most of the in¬ terval.

“I think it’s simply great!” said a voice, speaking English in a clear, girlish tone that cut through the surrounding French patois and Parisian argot like the notes of a flute.

She was one of a group of three standing in front of a pavilion-box not two feet from where Tardieu and his companion had temporarily halted.

“Don’t let’s settle down yet,” she went on. “I want to dance.”

“It isn’t as bad as I expected,” admitted a capablelooking woman, who held the girl’s arm within her own. “And since your father would let you come, I fervently hope it won’t get any worse. But who in the world would you dance with?”

“Here is papa,” said the girl tentatively.

A ruddy-faced party with a bald head, a tuft of whiskers protruding from his chin, turned towards the speaker.

“Gad, I’d like to, Millie! But you know I never learned anything but the Scottish hornpipe and the Virginia reel, and I wouldn’t dare tackle either one of them things here.”

“Eben!” exclaimed the woman. “Is it possible that you’re learnin’ to swear?”

Eben winked at his daughter.

“When you’re in Rome do as the Romans do, ma. And I was only tryin’ to get to understand these ani¬ mals before you wade in and reform ’em.”

“This is the sort of thing I object to,” muttered the chief of police in the judge’s ear. “You see this family? Americans, of course. We Parisians will simply corrupt them and send them home without ideals. The daughter’s head is turned already.”

But Tardieu had stepped forward and, was ad¬ dressing the mother in such English as he could recall from his student days.

“Pardon me, madame. Mats —did I hear your daughter say she wanted a partner? I am not exactly of the official committee-”

“Then what are you speakin’ to us for?”

The challenge was so abrupt that Tardieu’s Anglo- Saxon speech deserted him. But he had the presence of mind to reach into a pocket and produce his card.

“A judge of something—or is it school-teacher?” she read out. “It says ‘instruction.’ ”

“Madame , not so loud if you please. I am an exam¬ ining magistrate, and my duty compels me to be here in a private character. But if your daughter seeks to be able to say that she danced at this ball, without doubt she will find herself more willing to go home if-”

“Do let me, ma—just one turn. It will make the girls green with envy when they hear of it.”

And without waiting for a response, the speaker ex¬ tended her arms and permitted herself to be borne away into the rhythmic swirl of the hesitation, though there was more swirl than rhythm about it until they had made their way a considerable distance towards one of the bands.

“Are you really a judge?” she asked, her attention released by the growing distinctness of the tune. “Or was that what you call —blague is the word, isn’t it?”

“I really am, sans blague”

“Then I don’t suppose you came exactly for the purpose of rescuing young ladies from their par¬ ents?”

“No; I had a whim to scandalize one of my col¬ leagues.”

She laughed, but still with a pleasant, silvery quality of tone. And when Tardieu asked for her name, she replied expansively:

“Millie Granger, from Salem, Mass., U. S. A. And that’s my father and mother, naturally, that I’m with. At home I go alone everywhere, but Paris is supposed to be wicked—though I can’t see anything wicked about it.”

“I hope you never will,” Tardieu interjected. “Your people are right, however. This isn’t the place for you, and I’m going to try to frighten them into taking you home.”

“Not before the grande entree.

“Immediately after, then. There are a lot of roughs behind these masks.”

Tardieu, in fact, was waking up to the conscious¬ ness of having committed an indiscretion, and that to continue dancing would be sheer foolishness. Twice already he had heard himself called judge—once by Millie Granger and once by her mother. It was time to get rid of this partner, whose simple dress and untarnished young face made her so con¬ spicuous.

Nor was the judge’s uneasiness without foundation. A public bal masque is one vast ambush of unob¬ served eyes and of unnoticed ears, especially in Paris where is still the Latin habit of being always on the lookout for bits of information likely to be useful in the endless intrigues which lie behind nearly every event. At the very moment when he was presenting his card to Mrs. Granger, a group of clowns with gro¬ tesquely comic faces had been passing at his elbow, and one of them had caught at least a part of the mother’s exclamation.

“Did you get that, Vol-au-Vent?”

“Get what?”

“The stiff looking type in a black domino—the old one called him judge.”

“Let her. I was looking at the little one. Qu’elle a des beaux yeux —and just out of the nursery. If she’s staying, I think I’ll try my luck—eh, Haquenee?”

“Then I wouldn’t begin by calling names,” said the clown thus addressed. “If he’s a judge, though, I can guess the rest.”

“Who do you think it was, then?”

“Him?” Haquenee paused until his companions had gathered close around, then uttered the word just above a whisper:

“Tardieu! What other judge in Paris is human

THE TRAIL OF THE SQUID v

enough? Useful thing to know. Suppose, now, we just scatter and keep our mouths shut?”

The fun waxed over more fast and furious, but still preserved a certain decency and restraint. Grotesque creatures of all shapes and sizes pranced about—stilt¬ legged giraffes, harmless elephants composed of straw and bed-ticking, now and then a dragon belching Greek fire yet having at its heart nothing more serious than a party of young men, tfreir legs imperfectly hidden by draperies.

After a clown had come and beat her over the head with a toy balloon, Millie Granger was quite ready to enter the box where her parents had seated themselves. But she treated Tardieu to a little moue of defiance as he launched a parting warning.