No car lights were visible in the gloomy tunnel before him. But he detected the looming bulk of the darkened Renault twenty yards away, parked under the dripping trees. He approached it deliberately, his feet making small sucking sounds in the wet earth he trod.
And although he knew what he would find when he opened the Renault’s door and the dome light came on, he felt a pleasant sense of accomplishment at what he saw there in the front seat.
Yvonne and Alfred were in each other’s arms. Each face wore a look of joy and long-deferred satisfaction. Their half-opened lips were pressed together in a magnificently earthy kiss that roused a faint glow of envy in Gaston’s romantic breast.
And both were quite dead.
For a long moment, Gaston stood there, his head inside the Renault. His expression was that of an artist who stands back to regard a finished painting, proud and a trifle awed by the masterpiece he has wrought. For Gaston’s lipstick was indeed a minor masterpiece. Before him was the proof.
He could hear his own voice, very faint and off-stage, explaining to the wondering assistant chemists at Rousseau Frères exactly what a triumph of cosmetic chemistry that lipstick of his was. “You will remember,” he fancied himself saying, “that Madame Beaujolais was a woman to whom any physical contact with a member of the opposite sex was unpleasant. Yet what happens when she is driven home from the opera by her husband’s oldest friend? She moves closer to him in the car almost immediately. She begs him not to drive her directly home, but to take her to some dark spot where, like the veriest teen-age lovers, they can park their car, turn out the lights, and engage undisturbed in what our American allies at one time called ‘necking’. Yes, my friends, and when they found them, both dead as doornails, what was their position? They were locked in close embrace; their lips were joined in a passionate kiss.
“How can this be explained — this seemingly inexplicable tableau of death? I shall tell you. It was my lipstick that brought it all about; not only the death of the lovers — that alone would have been easy. But my lipstick was so formulated that it brought death in its fairest guise — a kiss!
“The death-dealing agent? Hydrocyanic acid. But, in all modesty, I must point out to you that it was my original variations on this ancient theme that are of interest. Let us take them in order. First, I desired to make a usually dispassionate woman want to be kissed. The answer, obviously, was a completely new kind of chemical — one that would work by osmosis through the skin of the lips and enter the blood stream in the mouth area with authority enough to arouse in the woman an intense desire, nay, a need to be kissed. Such a chemical I at length compounded, using the rendered salts of a number of other stimulating chemicals as the basic building block of my formula.
“Very well. We now have a lipstick that is lethal and contains a chemical to stimulate the kissing urge. But our difficulties are by no means at an end. Oh, no! Now we must discover some subtle means of holding the instantaneous virulence of hydrocyanic acid at bay, of making it remain quiescent and harmless until the moment of kissing. We don’t want the woman to die the moment she applies her lipstick, else the kissing chemical were purposeless.
“Such a substance, too, I was successful in finding. It is a colorless liquid whose source I shall not reveal to you as you might not believe me. Only a few drops serve our purpose. But this antidote to the poison, major discovery though it is, must be a temporary inhibitor only, as you can readily appreciate. Now we must have a catalyst, a trigger, if you will, to remove the restraints set upon the poison by the inhibitor, to reactivate, at the moment of kissing, the deadly acid that lurks in the lipstick on the lady’s lips.
“I see you have guessed the catalyst, my friends. And of course, you are right. The natural moisture of the mouth — here was the logical trigger to set off a lipstick explosion. But wait! Do you see the difficulty involved there? The almost insurmountable chemical problem posed by that simple requirement? The trigger cannot be the lady’s own saliva. Decidedly not. Merely licking her lips will then inevitably precipitate death. No, my problem, the most difficult one I faced, was to evolve a temporary antidote for hydrocyanic acid that would volatize and release the killing poison only on contact with the moisture of male lips.
“Over this problem D worked with what I must call genuine dedication for some weeks, only, in the end, to be but partially successful. For my solution necessarily embodied death for the man who was kissing her as well as for the woman herself. However, I have never pretended to perfection. Sometimes we must be satisfied with workable compromises. And after all, by the simple formulation of this lipstick, I did succeed in my major aim: removing Madame Beaujolais to make way for Henriette, and doing it in such a way that she was very happy in the end!”
Gaston realized, of course, that to address such a monologue as this to his laboratory colleagues would be insane. But by delivering it silently to himself, with his head inside a car on a dark track above Nice, he found that he was able to enjoy, vicariously, some of the approbation for his chemical brilliance that would undoubtedly have been his had he been able to reveal the secret of his lipstick to the world.
That thought brought him up sharply. There was still much to be done. From the pocket of his wet jacket he brought out Yvonne’s own harmless lipstick. He put it into her purse, removing at the same time the poisoned lipstick and placing it in his pocket. He left her purse open on the seat beside her body, and carefully placed near her right hand a tiny vial, empty, that had the letters HCN stamped on it in tiny type.
Then he closed the door of the car. The roof light snapped off. And the tragic burden of the Renault withdrew once more into decent darkness. He walked boldly back to his own car, confident that the rain would wash out the marks of his footsteps on the soft ground of the track.
Driving through the hills half an hour later on his way to St. Paul de Vence, he tried to imagine the surprise and shock with which all his acquaintances — and Yvonne’s — would react to the news tomorrow when the bodies were found. The only possible explanation would be a suicide pact, carried out by star-crossed lovers who preferred to swallow poison together as they kissed for the last time, rather than continue to dishonor a loving husband and dear friend by a shabby, clandestine love affair. Everybody in Nice knew that Alfred had always been in love with Yvonne. And now they would know that Yvonne must secretly have been in love with Alfred, too. Gaston Beaujolais smiled to himself, anticipating the efforts of the authorities in Nice to reach him at Grasse tomorrow with the ill tidings of his beloved wife’s death.
Henriette received him in her small house just after midnight, delighted that he was stopping even for a couple of hours with her. She exclaimed in distress when she saw his rain-dampened clothing, and scolded him gently about going out in the rain without wearing a waterproof. She took his wet jacket and shoes into her bedroom to dry them out before the tiny coal fire that was burning there this damp night; she brought him the dressing gown and slippers that he kept at her house for just such occasions as this.
Then, settling him comfortably in his favorite armchair, she smiled bewitchingly at him and dropped into his lap with eager affection. “Darling Gaston,” she said to him, in a warm voice, “I feel very much like a wife to you, tu sais. I believe no wife could hold you in higher esteem than I do, or love you half so much.” She leaned forward to kiss him, but he held her away from him by the shoulders while he said softly:
“Perhaps you shall be my wife before long, chérie.”