The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3) Page 2

  And she watched incomprehensible preparations, paralyzed as much by stupor as by her bonds. Firstly, she saw the man with the whip climb the stairs and go to inspect the dying man’s bedroom. Then, from the height of the galley, he renewed his cry—which must have been an order, given that his accomplices, without consulting one another, immediately took out the components of a metallic apparatus in the form of a spider, which had been hidden under their hooded jackets, and set it up on a tripod fitted with a handle.

  While one of them started the machine working, drawing sparks of a mauve fluid therefrom, intense enough to dominate the studio light, the other, with an agility and prehensive skill comparable to that of monkeys, disdaining the staircase, climbed up a pillar supporting the gallery and handed his chief a kind of steel helmet linked to the apparatus by a flexible wire.

  In possession of that object, the man in the gallery went back into Théophraste Lapastille’s redoubt and isolated himself with the dying man by dropping the curtain that was the sole partition separating it from the gallery.

  Let us open it again for the readers and allow them to witness the no-less-surprising scene unfolding within.

  Once in that room of sorts, the man with the whip first took off his hooded garment. Then, since the painter Lapastille was no longer in a position to appreciate the strangeness of anything, let us be astonished in his stead at seeing a rather slender silhouette appear, clad in a tight frock-coat, but with strongly-developed muscles: nothing, in sum, of the body of an athlete, but with the arms of a wrestler—with extremely hairy fists, we observe now that he has taken off his gloves.

  What seems paradoxical in that reduced stature, however, is the beard: an opulent brown fleece flowing like a river to the middle of the torso, so cumbersome that its possessor has to pick it up in masses of curls, which is nevertheless carefully groomed, like a child’s hair on the day of his first communion. Behind that abundant proliferation agitates a face composed of nothing but flat planes: a face in facets, nervous, pathetic and agitated, plagued by tics; while a metallic glint escapes from the overly narrow eyelids, at the whim of incessant blinking.

  That anatomical phenomenon set down his whip and his helmet on the chair occupied a little while before by Mélanie. He moved the lamp closer to the dying man, and when he had him clearly in view he murmured: “Ha ha! Five to the hour! A few moments more and I’d have had to renounce it entirely. The carcass will have to be completely revised, in any case. Let’s go—to work!”

  He took a flat case out of his frock-coat, from which he extracted a hollow needle about ten centimeters long, to which he fitted the neck of glass ampoule filled with a liquid that looked like blood. Having parted the painter’s shirt, without taking the trouble to delimit the region, he plunged the needle directly into the heart. Then he broke the other extremity of the ampoule and waited until atmospheric pressure had expelled the contents into the perforated organ. Then, with an abrupt movement, he withdrew his needle.

  Picking up the helmet he had previously set aside, he put it on the head of the dying man, which provoked the spurting of mauve sparks similar to the ones that the hooded physicist had produced in the studio. He consulted his watch, a chronograph. He counted ten seconds. He took off the metallic skullcap and awaited the result of his experiment, while caressing the curls of his beard.

  The effect was almost immediate. A slight redness animated the exsanguinated face of Théophraste Lapastille. His breathing became more perceptible, dilating his chest. His eyes resumed their position in the orbits, repossessed by the light of intelligence. His hands trembled slightly, acquiring the strength to push back the sheet. The flame revived, as in the days before his mortal attack.

  “You don’t recognize me?” asked the regenerator.

  Just as he had resumed breathing and gazing, the painter spoke: “No. Who are you?”

  “Tornada, of course. Your old friend Tornada. Have I changed that much? Or is it my beard, which I’m wearing a trifle more floridly?”

  A pell-mell of memories, like scenes passing through a cinematograph, inundated Lapastille’s interior screen.

  “You do in fact, resemble Tornada—but Professor Tornada is almost the same age as me, and you’re scarcely forty...”

  “Which proves, old Phraste, that your old Nada has been able to conserve himself a little better than you.”

  Old Nada, old Phraste: those terms of their ancient familiarity suddenly convinced the revived moribund. A further progress of his provisional survival: he sat up in bed.

  “Damn it!” he stammered. “You…it’s you! Of course! Am I still delirious?”

  “Absolutely not. Your noggin is as integral as mine.”

  “Integral noggin” was another expression of Tornada’s—the result of what origin and what education, no one could say, but he liked the gross spice of language, and cultivated a humor that was sometimes leaden. He put science into slang, led Aesculapius to the familiar. A droll lyricism emanated from his disquieting person. His comical quips had once been widely quoted, doing the tour of the teaching hospitals, the clinics and the laboratories. Later, when, although marked for more enviable situations, he had separated himself from official science to work in disdainful isolation, they had served as a weapon against him, accrediting the opinion that he was half mad.

  The emotion in Lapastille’s heart increased. His liaison with Tornada had been so fecund in intellectual surprises that it could well be, in fact, that his friend had remained young while others aged. He was already a kind of sorcerer, a magician in the arts of surgery and physiology...

  “I can’t get over your appearing to me like this!” said the painter. “It’s true that we haven’t seen one another for a long time. Everything kept us apart, though: situation and success. Your scientific discoveries—which I’ve followed passionately, believe me—have brought you the applause of the world, while my mediocrity, my lack of success, has held me in an obligatory shadow...”

  “Lose that habit of false modesty. It’s always done you harm. You’re an ace, like me. You have genius, like me—but it’s less obvious to the stupid crowds. Me, I touch them at the roots...”

  “Thirty years…how far away it is, already!” regretted the painter.

  “No, it’s close at hand,” protested Tornada; and he added, enigmatically: “if one considers it as I can. Life has separated us, but death has brought us together again, in order to renew life.”

  Théophraste Lapastille did not try to interpret that. Did the last remark relate solely to what they were saying? If he was still as he had been before, Tornada continually leapt from one subject to another without any apparent thread. His cerebral machinery vibrated in an incessant rotation, encountering a new lure at every turn, which it gripped in passing, only to abandon it again immediately, so there was nothing to rely on in his speech.

  He went on: “Death. Your death. But I’ll wager that you don’t even suspect that you were in the process of peacefully popping your clogs?”

  “What are you saying? Was I dying?”

  “He suspects!” Tornada exploded. “Well, yes, old Phraste, you were fading fast. At seventy five, confess that that’s a trifle precocious! But what is more serious is that you were about to take that fall without letting me know. If I hadn’t found out fortuitously...”

  “From whom?”

  “From my police. Fortunately, they brought me here in time to bid you au revoir…unless you’d prefer it to be adieu.” Perfidiously, he added: “If you absolutely don’t want that inheritance...”

  This time, Lapastille leapt on his bed like a carp. What! Tornada knew that old story of the testament, the fairy tale, so fantastic that the interested parties, in order to avoid curiosity, reportage and perhaps ridicule, had sworn reciprocally to keep the secret, and had even demanded an oath from the lawyers that they would keep quiet too?

  “What inheritance are you talking about, Tornada?”

  “Come on, old Phraste, d
on’t play the trickster with me. If it’s necessary to refresh your memory as well as your carcass…” He picked up his whip, stuck it under his arm and sat astride a chair, which gave him the appearance of a bearded jockey. In fact, was he not about to ride a kind of hobby-horse?

  “At three o’clock in the afternoon on the eighth of February 1910, at the age of sixty,4 you were in the study of Maître Gervais, notary, in the Boulevard de Sebastopol. He introduced you to a young medical student, twenty-two years old, Marcel Granive, whom he declared to be your second cousin. Having acquainted you with that relative, of whom you were unaware, the lawyer solemnly opened a red envelope that contained a testament. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. How do you know?”

  “Let me go on. That testament was the final lunacy of an uncle of whom you and your cousin were equally unaware, your uncle Louis Lapastille, an adventurer of sorts, who had set off at young age to dig for gold in the Klondike, and then fetched up, in his old age, in New York, where he was a member of the club of billionaires. It is necessary not to believe any longer in American uncles, since the war that so disastrously associated our polite French folk with the improper Transatlantics, who left again thereafter—but your uncle was, in fact, not a myth.

  “He had made his debut long before the universal catastrophe and had succeeded in amassing an incalculable fortune, consisting primarily of jewels collected in India by touts, gold ornaments, celebrated art-works and paintings, always bought via intermediaries in sales in France, Italy or Holland, and, finally, of the gold nuggets that his lucky stars had led him to discover. He also discovered, and profitably took possession of, the treasure of the Maharajah of Mandore, which, having been brought to England two centuries ago by a cargo-ship, sank off the Isle of Wight, previous attempts to fish it up having been in vain. That, I know from my personal information, because he didn’t boast, your uncle Louis.

  “In brief, all of this colossal wealth, which, if liquidated, would have made him the richest man on earth—I estimate it at three billion or thereabouts—your uncle had gathered in Brow City, a small town out there, in a country house—or, rather, a fortress—which he had had specially built and which was guarded night and day by twenty policemen. They are there still, watched over in the same fashion. Am I correct?”

  “Yes.” Lapastille lit up. “Out there is Brow City there’s a fresco by Titian and Giorgione, which those two masters destined for the Fondacio dei Tedeschi in Venice. There are all the sketches for the pictures that Rubens painted for the Jesuit church in Anvers, burned in 1718. There’s a dawn scene by Ruydaël, six landscapes by Poussin, bas-reliefs by Pigalle; a Serment d’amour by Fragonard; seventeenth-century wood carvings; a Phèdre by Polygnotus; and primitives, and moderns…there’s…there’s a heap of marvels, in sum…marvels!”

  “Of inestimable value—which, in accordance with the testament opened in Maître Gervais’ study, your uncle left to his natural heir Théophraste Lapastille, the only son of his brother Adolphe, and, in default of him—if he were to die without issue—to his sister-in-law, Madame Zulma Granive, wife of the late Théodore Granive, or to the posterity of the latter. Is that correct?”

  “That’s correct. There is also, in the Brow City treasure, Raphael’s Pythagoras Admonishing Diogenes, three Muses by Le Sueur; part of the Campana collections, of which Napoléon didn’t get the whole; and Gobelins after drawings by Lebrun. And prints by Perino del Vaga!”

  “Let me finish, damn it!” Tornada said, impatiently. “The testament in question would therefore have made overnight, of Théophraste Lapastille or some Granive or other, a unique potentate, if Uncle Louis had not included therein one last paragraph, which I quote word for word: ‘My heirs, whether they be of the Lapastille or the Granive branch, will only enter into possession of my fortune on the eighth of February 1950’—which is to say, twenty-five years from now. ‘Until that date, my possessions will lie dormant in Brow City, such as they presently are, under the protection of the American authorities.’”

  Having finished his quotation, Tornada spread-eagled his chair-mare. He hoisted himself up on his short legs, brandished his whip and proclaimed: “And Théophraste Lapastille, the primary heir of Uncle Louis, is dying at seventy-five, dispossessed of that fantastic treasure by Dr. Marcel Granive, son of Zulma Granive, née Lapastille.”

  “I’m submissive to my destiny!” said the painter, nonplussed.

  “One does not submit to destiny; one controls it.”

  “How?”

  “By coming to knock on Tornada’s door!”

  “Seventy-five is an age at which one can retire, old Nada!”

  “In all of this, you’ve been inexcusably flabby! Come on! Shouldn’t you have made sure that you had at least a dozen kids? In order not to let billions go astray, one marries ten times over—twenty times, if necessary—until one encounters a woman capable of bearing children in perpetuity! That’s what I would have done—me, Tornada!”

  “I’ve certainly thought about it...but it would have been necessary to encounter that elite companion.”

  “It doesn’t matter who, as long as she play Mère Gigogne!”5

  Lapastille smiled. He found in that unconstrained language the dear whimsy of his friend, similar to his own! But he did not only smile at that. He also smiled at his old slave of forty years; he searched the gloom behind Tornada with his eyes, and when he found that she was not there, he leaned forward confidentially. “There was certainly one from whom I might have claimed the assistance that you reproach me for having neglected…but of too humble a condition...”

  “Prejudice!” said Tornada, critically, darting a glance over the gallery.

  “And then, so pure of soul…a true saint! I would never have dared!”

  “It’s a case of repeating audaces fortuna.6 The old adages are sometimes apt.”

  “From fortune, old Nada, I don’t ask anything. I don’t need anything. The little I earn is sufficient. I would only have used that inheritance to spread a little balm over the poverty that grips the world. Yes, to create works, to do good. There are so many unfortunate individuals, and so few charitable ones!”

  “That’s true. Man is a vulture to his fellows. That’s why I’ve thought, like you, of changing Society...” He made a leveling gesture with his whip, as if he were shaving heads. But after another gesture, which put off that task for a future time, he went on: “How mistaken one can be! I would have thought, myself, that Théophraste Lapastille, the artist I knew, would either have held on until 1950, or that he would have ensured his posterity, in order not to allow the marvels accumulated in Brow City to fall into foreign hands.”

  “To bequeath them to the Museums!” the painter enthused. “But perhaps the Granives will also send them there.”

  That name, reintroduced into the conversation, had an electric effect on Tornada. Fury contracted his visage, propagating along his beard, which began to stir like water tormented by deep-seated waves. His right hand clenched on his frock-coat.

  “The Granives? You think that I’ll permit that? The inheritance to the Granives? To that Marcel Granive, whom I despise—and how! Do you know what that Marcel Granive is? He’s a fake scientist, a usurper, a swindler, a bandit! He’s stolen from me my dear! He’s stolen a microbe from me—yes, my Micrococcus vitalisans! You’re not up to date, but it’s a bacillus that acts on organisms by ridding them of toxins…hence prolonging life. It’s what I had been searching for, for a long time—what I’ve always been searching for. Well, Marcel Granive has robbed me of my bacillus! And to do what? To make a serum—my God, a serum! A serum to sell, or, rather, that he gets rogues of his own sort to sell, at fifty francs for ten grams. You see what a crook he is? Because, if he had also been able to cultivate it, my Micrococcus vitalisans…but that’s what he still doesn’t know…he’s neglected the drop of methyl oxiadecalmeliformine that ensures the fermentation! So, his drug is fraud in a bottle. And there you are! That’s the man who has b
een made an official scientist, who’s been proclaimed a master, who has recently been given the cravat!7 The cravat...wait a while; I’ve got one of those in reserve for him myself, a cravat! Mine’s made of hemp!”

  A glance at the painter abruptly suspended his diatribe however. His interlocutor was no longer following the conversation. He had gone pale again. His eyelids were emptying; his head was falling back on the pillow. The action of the fluid employed to give him a respite before passing on to the beyond had abruptly ceased.

  “Hey! Are you going to kick the bucket again?” shouted Tornada, in whom the religion of death was decidedly devoid of possession.

  But all that he attempted to do in order to reanimate his friend was in vain. The ineluctable ran its course. In a matter of minutes the soul of Théophraste Lapastille was separated from his mortal remains.

  Then Tornada went back to the gallery and cracked his whip at his acolytes, who were guarding Mélanie.

  Chapter II

  The chambermaid came in. “Pardon me if I’m disturbing Madame,” she said, politely, “but Monsieur has telephoned the butler to warn Madame that he’s been retained at the laboratory and that Madame shouldn’t wait for him. He’ll rejoin Madame for tea at the embassy.”

  “That’s all right, Rose. Tell the butler to telephone Monsieur to say that I won’t be at the embassy, and that he should come back when he can.”

  “Is Madame ill?”

  “No, Rose—merely a little fatigued.

  “That’s understandable, Madame goes out too much.”

  The wide eyes of the mistress of the house—two firebrands asleep beneath the bistre ashes of the eyelids—lit up to signify to the soubrette that her advice had overstepped the mark.

  Once she was alone again, Madame Marcel Granive reinstalled herself on the cushions of her precious chaise-longue and picked up her book—but her train of thought was no longer following the lines. She was reliving her own novel: her hectic impetuous life, since the time when, borne away by fairground performers, she had left her remote corner of Spain in rags to become, in Paris, the celebrated dancer Carmen Solario.