The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3) Page 8

  Momentarily, she was gripped by anger against the incapable individual who had not been able to save them from bankruptcy; but she adored him, and he seemed so downcast himself, poor fellow, so worn down by anxieties—of which she knew, deep down, she was the sole object.

  He understood that she was waiting for explanations.

  “I gave him all the reasons for keeping the loan going. I told him about my hopes for the prosperity of my other products, my certainty that my new anti-scarlatina serum would be lucrative. For a moment, he hesitated, but he replied that the experiment with the vitalisans was sufficient and that, given that science is evolving in giant strides, a procedure might surge forth overnight that might ruin the preceding one. He’s not wrong, and Tornada is the proof. Oh, that Tornada, if I could only get my hands around his neck…!

  “In brief, I was preaching to a locked strong-box. He might perhaps have been sensitive to vulgar arguments—Uncle Louis’ inheritance for example which is unconcerned with science, even hypothetical, untouchable by future discovery...yes, if I’d been able to make that will shine, I’d have got the deal! He might even have advanced me more money. But there you are: Uncle Louis will go to the Lapastilles, to their seven children. Yes, they’ve just had another one. And for you, for our three little ones, poverty. For me, a local practice...”

  She straightened up. “You, Marcel, do that job! You, run around making visits, climbing stairs day and night, like a drudge! No, I’ll never permit that!”

  “It will be necessary, my poor Carmen.”

  “No, no—something else. Great ills require great remedies!”

  “What do you call great remedies?” He added, joking bitterly: “I’ve found them, great remedies—what good have they done us?”

  She gestured to him to shut up. She made him sit next to her on the sofa, initially holding him at a distance from her long undulating body. She was meditating. Then she drew closer, and in a feline voice to which he was always submissive, she said: “Marcel, what’s become of your work on the para-carbon bacterium? Is it finished?”

  “Yes, it’s complete.”

  “What will you call that virus?”

  “I won’t call it anything.”

  “You’re no longer going to communicate it to the Societé des Sciences Biologiques?”

  “Not any more. What’s the point. It’s a culture that can’t be of any use to anyone. It’s just a curiosity, a scientific amusement...”

  “You told me, however, that it presents the particularity—interesting for everyone—that it acts by absorption.”

  “Indeed, in a matter of hours.”

  “So dangerous?”

  “Like a thunderbolt.”

  “And without leaving any trace, I believe?”

  “Tornada himself wouldn’t be able to detect it.”

  A long glance associated them. He had no need to ask why she was interrogating him so closely. She was only interested in his work when she knew that it had produced positive results. So, a connection between the toxicity of the virus and their present difficulties could only be imperative. Between scoundrels, dotting the is is a species of insolence.

  “A sure, discreet weapon. Have you mentioned it…?”

  “Not to anyone.”

  She got up and went to fetch a letter from the dressing-table, which she had received in the morning mail.

  “Read it.”

  It was a printed circular with the heading of the Red Cross. Nurses were being recruited for the clinic at Saint-Cloud. Their functions and pay were set out.

  Marcel crumpled the sheet of paper. “It’s impossible! It’s crazy—the stuff of serial novels. Remember that you’re Madame Marcel Granive, known and appreciated. They’ll demand papers!”

  “Ha! Do you think I’ll present my own?”

  “Come on! Carmen Solario will be as rapidly unmasked as Madame Marcel Granive!”

  “Carrying the identity papers of her cousin Savine, who died during the war? The papers, in fact, that I presented to you, in the army, when, having seen you in your beautiful uniform, I sensed that there was only one man in the world by whom I wanted to be loved, and that the man in question might hesitate to engage Carmen Solario?”

  “How mistaken you were!” he smiled. “But only a woman of the world could be so beautiful, and you’d be discovered within twelve hours, my love.”

  “By whom? By the wretches who are going to enter into Tornada’s service, do you think? The war’s over, Marcel. Charity no longer drives our sort. Those who will go there aren’t from our world. They won’t know me. And then, when one has been in the theater, one knows how to put on a mask, damn it! A change of hairstyle, a pleat in the lips, a dash of make-up, smoked glasses, and you’re unrecognizable!”

  “Extravagant! And dangerous! Don’t give it another thought.”

  They did think about it, however, later that day, and even more the following day. In brief exchanges, and covert remarks, they determined the legitimacy of a murder. Had they not been cheated? Normally, would not the Lapastilles be in the grave? Did they not have the right to set destiny to rights? It was even a duty, for the future of their children. What would they not do for them?

  And their conscience did not quiver.

  The day after that, Marcel came back from the laboratory carrying a cage wrapped in paper. It enclosed a russet dog, which, as soon as it was liberated, licked their hands. They shut themselves away with it in the billiard room, tied it to a table-leg and presented it with a biscuit that the husband had sprinkled with a few drops from a mysterious ampoule. For two hours they watched, impassively, the imploration of its poor gilded eyes, its shiverings, the stiffening of its limbs. It still wanted them to stroke it...

  “And if, at the same time, you can pick up a little of his serum…,” said Marcel, confiding a larger ampoule to her, as well as a small file with which to detach its extremities.

  Three days later, carrying death in her handbag—the circular specified no luggage—Carmen took the tram to Saint-Cloud. She was received by Théophraste Lapastille. Thus far, few nurses had presented themselves. People were afraid of the strange factory of life; legends were running around about its master. The general administrator asked her questions, perused her papers. He was immediately impressed by the notes made there by superior officers. The reserved manners of the candidate also delighted him.

  “But why are you wearing dark glasses?”

  “Conjunctivitis, contracted during the war while caring for the wounded,” Carmen said, raising the spectacles to display her eyes, reddened by an irritant solution.

  “I don’t know whether the professor will like that much. Anyhow, if your drops aren’t working, perhaps a change of eyes…?”

  She was taken to the vestry. Clad in the classic smock, with a hat embroidered with a green T, she had the unique task of collecting the patients who had undergone operations when they emerged from their chrysalides and preparing them to leave. She witnessed deliriant awakenings. All the resuscitated individuals expressed the enthusiasm of their rebirth loudly, the poor clutching to heir chest a check signed by Lapastille. Lepidoptera do not soar more lightly toward the sky than those people to the border of a new life. Outside, relatives waited, and auto engines roared.

  In spite of everything, Carmen experienced a confused admiration for the magician. She touched the murderous phial in her pocket more resolutely, telling herself that she was not going to make use of it against him.

  She adapted to her new métier without weakness, and quickly made herself appreciated by the personnel director. It was inevitable that she should distinguish herself in company of such modest extraction, incapable of suspecting her. She kept herself apart, in any case.

  A crew of workmen, rapidly summoned and rapidly sent away, had fitted out empty buildings for the new personnel close to the exterior, and hence isolated from the rest of the clinic. Dormitories refectories, hydrotherapy rooms—everything that one might wish wa
s there. Sure of her incognito and her impunity, Carmen slept profoundly and ate the savory nourishment with a hearty appetite. Her only worry was being shut up there for a long time, unable to get close to Tornada.

  He remained invisible. Retrenched behind his high walls, at the far end of the immense property, guarded by his chimpanzees, who would have opposed any incursion into his vicinity, he could only be divined by the incessant circulation of the wagons transporting the mummies and the explosion, by day as by night, of whistle-blasts and luminous rockets, guttural cries and orders that were incomprehensible to anyone but the apes, transmitted by loudhailer.

  At night those noises, the flashes and the aerial language, woke Carmen up. She thought about the Wysnauer loan, raged, and went back to sleep.

  On the morning of the sixth day, however, an event came to her aid. She was dressing a Chinese woman who was laughing at her transformation with her slanting eyes when a frenetic little man clad in white with a cowled beard and a black skullcap on his bald head arrived, very agitated. She deduced that she was in the presence of Tornada.

  He went up to Mélanie, who had just arrived.

  “One of my little ones has clapped out. To replace her in the rotunda, I need an intelligent girl, reliable and handy. I need her right away.”

  “I think this one…,” said Mélanie, pointing at Carmen.

  “There’s something wrong with her eyes?”

  “Nothing much...”

  “Anyway, there’s no danger of infection.”

  White the director trussed Carmen in a one-piece garment extracted from a sterilizer, Tornada interrogated his new collaborators. He obtained nothing from them but terrorized babble.”

  “Morons—that’s all you could get?” he reproached Mélanie, who brought the recruit. “If this one’s the same kind, I’m in real trouble!”

  Nevertheless, he took her, stuffing her behind him on his wagon. A frightening journey! Carmen compared it to the aerial ride that had marked her debut in a theater in Chicago. Now, a valkyrie in spectacles, what tragic adventure was carrying her off in the wake of this modern Wotan? She shivered as she looked at the enigmatic constructions that the vehicle skirted; she feared a catastrophe as they approached the fortress, whose door remained closed even though they were approaching it at an incredible speed.

  But Tornada abruptly slowed down. He pirouetted toward her. “Take off your glasses. Show me your mug. Very nice. What’s your name?”

  “Savine Montala.”

  “Well, once through this door you’ll answer to the name of Jibi. That’s the she-ape you’re replacing. And you’ll see how intelligent, well-trained, polite and conscientious her brothers are! So genteel and so devoted too! An elite. But no flirting, you know!”

  He became grave again at the steel door. The partition of that unknown world rose up, to fall slowly behind them. There, everything was silence, and everything became light. They set foot on the platform and penetrated into the stifling atmosphere of the first rotunda. Carmen was glad to be wearing nothing but a leotard. Long crystal tubes descended vertically from the palpitating radiance of the vault.

  In the middle stood a diabolical device armed with saws, forceps, curettes, knives and metallic arms with fingers, retracted into the armature for the moment but ready to emerge at the man’s command. In front of it was a diving-suit on a cart; around it, immobile at their posts, the standing figures of Dr. Tréfond and two of his half-brothers, the chimpanzees. There was a dial on the side wall, with red needles that only indicated minutes.

  Tornada took off his smock and appeared, like everyone else, in a leotard. That simple rind, exaggerated by the heat of the place, gave him a clownish appearance. His whip, which he had kept under his arm, completed the resemblance.

  “Put your glasses back on, Jibi, and open your acoustics.”

  He took her to the keyboard of a typewriter supported by a table set against the side wall, in such a way that the person making use of it could not see what he was doing without indiscretion.

  “You see the instrument? It executes at a distance by the simple pressure of the keys, the presentation of the objects I need. I’m charging you with its operation. When I say ‘one’ you press key number one, ‘six,’ you press number six, and so on. Understood? The she-ape you’re replacing did it marvelously. Perhaps you’ll be as useful.”

  He returned to the group and articulated a gruff order. The chimpanzee split the diving-suit open, took out a sleeping body and placed it on the operating table. Before the cart drew away of its own accord, Tornada, in order to confirm a preliminary diagnosis, consulted a radiography record, which, since the subject had been asleep, had been inscribed in the depths of the apparatus, revealing in nuances of shadow, the organs that it was necessary to replace with new tissues of animal origin. The latter, prepared in advance by Tornada, were palpitating on trays.

  And the ritual unfolded: an astonishing submission of matter to the genius of the man who had not even gloved his hands, infection having been annihilated in advance by the marvelous serum. While feigning indifference, Carmen turned her head sufficiently not to miss a single detail. Yes, during the war she had witnessed dramas of separated flesh, broken bones and streaming blood, and the actions of the sacrificers had often excited her admiration, but here there was nothing comparable: a mechanical incursion into inert tissues, the silent removal of organs exsanguinated by a powerful vasoconstrictor.

  He was an old man—very old. He had a waxy face, shriveled limbs, parchment-like skin without any apparent venous tracks. His worn hands proclaimed that he was a manual laborer. Two days before he had been worn out, and the radiography attributed the principal damage to the heart, the liver and the kidneys. The most banal of transubstantiations. The other agents would complete the rejuvenation..

  Tornada threw away his whip. “Four!”

  Carmen pressed the prescribed key. A metallic arm prolonged by a pair of secateurs, already in action, sprang from the operating table and came to offer them to the surgeon, who had only to guide them to break through the thoracic wall as if opening a shutter, separate the membranes, perforate the pericardium and lay bare the viscera.

  “Seven!”

  Carmen obeyed, and the seven brought out a trenchant shell that circumscribed the heart, cutting through the attachments, the vessels and the nerves, and propelled it on to the floor. Diligently, Dr. Tréfond held out the organ to be substituted, furnished by a pig. Tornada introduced it into the gap that he had just hollowed out.

  “Two!... Fourteen!... Nine!” The magician was in haste—and a succession of forceps, hooks, separators, extensors, rakes and needles, obedient to the pressure of the commanded key, surged from the incredible apparatus, and then, under Tornada’s guidance and that of his colleague Tréfond, worked, vibrated, grated and buzzed in the depths of the thoracic cage, juxtaposing the unequal flesh, soldering the gaping vessels, rejoining the twisted nerves, sowing up the torn membranes and sweeping away the inevitable debris.

  “Twelve!”

  This time, it was a receptacle that was offered. It poured out something like liquid flesh. The surgeon directed the jet toward the newly-implanted heart. The additional substance, which espoused the viscera, formed a kind of isolating, scarring garment designed for subsequent resorption.

  Then the five closed the osseous shutter, closing the rib-cage, and the twenty brought a platinum brush from the vault, which overflew the violated region, peppering it with mauve sparks.

  “How long?” asked Tornada.

  Tréfond glanced at the red needles. “Four minutes.”

  “One too many? Am I weakening?”

  He was more expeditious with the liver and the kidneys. The transmutation of the two organs in question, accomplished in the same manner, with the aid of similar implements, only required five minutes in total. The rapidity of the execution delighted Tornada. He cracked his knuckles.

  For Carmen, however, that became the crucial moment. S
he constrained her nerves to look out for the serum. It was there, in a grove in the metallic bed, beneath the crystal of a few minuscule ampoules, and Tornada had just flicked the switch that opened the hiding-place. She marked the place passionately. Oh, if she could take a drop, just one drop, of that prodigious liquid to her husband, who would be able to counterfeit it, their fortunes would be resplendent again! They would be able to wait in luxury for the inheritance that would be brought back to the Granives by the imminent fatal accident of all the Lapastilles.

  She saw Tornada break the neck of the ampoule. He raised it to his nostrils and sniffed it, as if it were intoxicating. An intoxication indeed: the intoxication of his renovative genius, his quasi-divine power! The intoxication, too, of capturing in a Pravaz syringe the particle that was, in a matter of seconds, about to combat and delay the age-old order of nature.

  “Ping!” he barked, as he pushed the needle into the heart of the man of whom he had operated.

  He withdrew it swiftly, turned the mummy over, and repeated the installation in the spinal column.

  Then, the prodigy accomplished, the flame revived. Already, the tissues of the reanimated individual were regenerating. Already, his face was flushed, his breast was rising, his muscles quivering and his hair prickling. Everything, in that cadaver of sorts, was resuming the tranquil appearance of a man asleep.

  “You can look now, Jibi. Admit that it’s wonderful!”

  She did not reply. That sorcerer she would have massacred—but even so, he surpassed his legend. When she looked up again, he was no longer there. She perceived him, through the mist of the windows, already operating in the next rotunda, assisted by Tréfond, with another animal personnel, including a she-ape at the keyboard.

  She waited for the moment. Standing up, she watched the two chimpanzees. They were cleaning the room. They deployed a scrupulousness, a precaution and a method worthy of the heirs of Adam. They folded away the mechanical apparatus, closed the levers, and greased the springs. Then they swept the tiles, spreading a sterilizing vapor scented with musk. Tornada claimed to have abolished infection, but he mistrusted even so the sly return of nature.