Kenneth Robeson
The Flame Breathers
Also In This Series
By Kenneth Robeson
#1: JUSTICE, INC.
#2: THE YELLOW HOARD
#3: THE SKY WALKER
#4: THE DEVIL’S HORNS
#5: THE FROSTED DEATH
#6: THE BLOOD RING
#7: STOCKHOLDERS IN DEATH
#8: THE GLASS MOUNTAIN
#9: TUNED FOR MURDER
#10: THE SMILING DOGS
#11: RIVER OF ICE
WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY
CHAPTER I
Dreadful Night
In Paris they thought of him as a very queer duck, indeed.
Usually people came to Paris to have a good time, even when they come from Poland, as this man had come. Particularly when they come via the United States, which is a splendid place to make money, but where men tend to work too hard.
But this man, who had landed in Paris after a stay in America, had obviously not come to have a good time. It would seem that he had come to hunt a hole, crawl into it, and then pull it in after him.
He had been in the hotel for nearly three weeks, and only three or four times had he been out of his room at all. On those rare occasions, had he participated in the night life of the gay city? He had not. The concierge — the doorman-superintendent — of the hotel knew. He knew because he had been curious enough to follow this Polish guest.
The man had walked, just before dawn, along the Seine breathing in great gulps of fresh air. That was all. And as he walked he looked over his shoulder. So the concierge got a hint of it.
The man was a little afraid of something.
Had the man himself been able to read that conjecture in the mind of the concierge, he would have laughed like a soul in purgatory.
A little afraid! Is that what you say about a horror that rode your shoulders day and night? Is that what you would say about a terror that robbed you of all the pleasures of life — for fear they would end in the gurgle of death?
The man’s name was Wencilau. He had the air of being “somebody.” He walked and acted, in spite of the terror that warped his hours, like a man who had accomplished great things.
He was about forty, slightly bald, rather small, and wore thick glasses.
On that dreadful night, at a little after twelve, he was peering through those glasses at a newspaper clipping. He had studied it so often, with bated breath, that he knew it by heart, syllable for syllable.
The item was from a Berlin paper, dated nearly a month ago.
Herr Dr. Shewski, well-known Polish scientist, was fatally stricken in his Gartenstrasse apartment last night, shortly after twelve o’clock, by an attack of illness later diagnosed as acute indigestion. Dr. Shewski was dying before his servant could break down the bedroom door and come to his master’s aid.
The exact cause of death has physicians baffled. Though diagnosed as acute indigestion, it displayed none of the true symptoms of that ailment in a later autopsy. There was more than a suspicion of poison. However, no trace of poisoning appeared in exhaustive analyses.
Herr Shewski’s servant was questioned for several hours, following the man’s queer statement. That was that he broke into the bedroom in time to see his master breathe his last, and that Dr. Shewski’s breath was on fire. The servant has since been committed for mental examination, since, of course, such a statement must have resulted from an hallucination.
Wencilau put the item away in his wallet with trembling fingers. In his brain burned part of the item:
“There was more than a suspicion of poison. However, no trace of poisoning appeared in exhaustive analyses.”
Wencilau was very thirsty. And if his emaciated appearance indicated anything, he was also famished. But he was afraid to eat — and afraid to drink.
“There was more than a suspicion of poison.”
At seven o’clock that evening, Wencilau had had his dinner. He had eaten it in his room, where he took all his meals since crawling into this obscure hotel to hide. But the food was cold because it had been delivered at four thirty and he didn’t eat till seven o’clock. Wencilau had spent the two and a half hours examining the four simple items of the dinner for poison. All the resources of a brilliant chemist had been exerted to ascertain that there was no known poison in the stuff. After that, to make doubly sure, Wencilau had fed a morsel of each course to a canary, now singing blithely in the artificial daylight of the unshaded electric bulb. And the canary was still all right.
No poison in the food. And now Wencilau was thirsty. So he prepared to take a drink of water.
The preparations showed, once more, how fearful the Pole was.
There was water on tap at the washstand in the corner. There was half a bottle of mineral water on the table. He went for neither.
He took a new, sealed bottle of water from a case, and examined it carefully. The foil around neck and crown was untampered with, he could swear. When he opened the bottle there was the little sigh of inrushing air showing that the stopper had not been removed before.
A new, sealed bottle of pure, distilled water. He lifted it to his lips and drank.
For about twenty seconds Wencilau stood erect, staring at the innocent bottle of water with eyes that widened in growing horror till they seemed about to engulf the rest of his thin, sensitive face.
Then he caved in in the middle as if a large hinge had suddenly been substituted for his abdominal muscles. He fell slowly to the floor, writhed for a few more seconds and then lay still.
In the cage, the canary sang and sang, as if to the memory of the man who had fed him those morsels from his dinner, hours ago. Then the canary hopped to a tiny cup affixed to the bars and dipped his bill in water.
There was no more singing.
The canary fluttered a little and was still. Bird and man in stark death. Though neither had had any food not rigidly tested, and though both had drunk from a tightly sealed, foolproof water bottle.
It was the concierge who called the gendarmes.
The man had been waiting for Wencilau to take his late-night walk for a bit of fresh air. He had intended to follow him again, for he was very curious, indeed, and he expected, one of these nights, to trail the man to whatever it was that made him act so queerly.
When Wencilau didn’t appear, he finally opened the door with his passkey.
The French gendarmerie is one of the best police organizations in the world. An inspector looked at the body convulsed on the floor and said instantly, “Poison!”
Then the laboratories went to work.
They analyzed the stomach contents. They analyzed the bottled water and crumbs from the man’s dinner plate. They analyzed a sample of the room’s air. They inspected the water in the tap.
Since the bird was also dead along with its owner, they even repeated the same drawn out performance with the canary.
And they came to one absolute conclusion.
There was no trace of poison.
Monsieur Wencilau had died as if in the agonies of deadly poisoning, but there had been no poison in anything he ate, breathed or drank.
Next morning, an excerpt from a Paris newspaper read:
— Well-known Polish scientist, Monsieur Wencilau, died of an attack later diagnosed as acute indigestion—
Two days dater, in Montreal, Canada, a man paced the living room floor of a hotel suite and chewed feverishly on a long, black cigar.
The man was big, florid-faced, heavy-set. He had graying, shaggy eyebrows and looked like a swashbuckling fellow who feared neither man nor devil.