Murder On the Way! by Theodore Roscoe

Author:Theodore Roscoe [Roscoe, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bold Venture Press
Published: 2017-03-16T23:00:00+00:00

VIII.

Cacos!

Ten minutes in which to prove myself an artist! From all that olla-podrida of demonism, death and dark I recall that particular injunction as the maddest. Breakfast after murder may be more or less in the tradition; our fiction detective steps over the corpse to finger a bibelot on the mantelpiece and yawn a criticism to some Florentine ceramist; but portrait painting — To leap from a sweat-bath in the Chamber of Horrors the frivolity of smock and palette! Ten minutes in which to prove myself an artist!

A thousand years ago (or was it two days before yesterday) an art committee had given me ten days. And who was that Fleming who spent a whole week on a broomstick? Ten minutes!

“Allons donc!”

This time tropical Haiti couldn’t wait. I stared down my nose, shatterpated, at the menacing snout of Narcisse’s machine-gun pistol. Narcisse’s machine-guh pistol was nudging my belt buckle. Narcisse’s eyes were reasonless as onyx beads on the heads of hatpins. He thrust me back on my heels.

“Paint, m’sieu!”

In that dormitory of criminals, that jungle-hemmed manse where Death struck the minute your back was turned? That house wasn’t a studio, and its atmosphere would have made the twilight in an octopus cave sweet by comparison. I continued to stand brainless as a cigar store Comanche. Lieutenant Nemo Narcisse gave me a prod. There was no time for temperament.

“You and ma’mselle. To your room.”

Sweet land of liberty, if the man didn’t mean it! He gave a low-voiced order in creole. Corporal Louis relayed it in honks to the gendarmes. Manfred, En-sign, Widow Gladys and Toadstool were escorted toward the back of the house.

Then, tramp, tramp, tramp, Harelip Louis on one hand, a pair of awed gendarmes on the other, Tousellines bringing up the rear and Lieutenant Narcisse in the van, Pete and I were marched up the staircase to the mezzanine, along the balcony to that room assigned as mine, the front room between Pete’s and the late Uncle Eli’s. Our corporal produced candles and started a candelabra on the bedside table, but the darkness was little remedied. Candles couldn’t pinch, hit for the required “north light” in that artist’s quarter. The fluttering, emaciated yellow gleams were solemn as church. Added to the pouring of rain in outer dark and the echo of the drums, candle-light gave the chamber all the foolish and sinister tenebrosity of a college fraternity “goat room” in which an initiated Freshman might be killed.

“Great God!” I managed an aside to Pete. “They’re going to carry it through.”

Her eyes clouded and she whispered, “You’ll have to show them. Stretch the canvas, anyway. I’ll slip to my room for the costume — then they’ll see — ”

While she was gone with one of those Nubian escorts, I got in a few of my more stellar oaths for Narcisse’s benefit. “And there’s the painting,” I concluded a Philippic on the situation, madder by the second and obviously doing my cause no good. “I haven’t an easel with me, a frame to stretch it on, but if you insist — ”

Suspicion worked on his face.

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