LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

to the handcuffs. "Also the coat. Don't be alarmed! You will experience nothing unpleasant—nothing. There! Now I want the right arm bare above the elbow. No, no, it's the left arm, I remember, I want the left arm bare above the elbow."

      When these directions had been carried out, Dr. Duprat pointed to a heavy wooden chair with a high back and wide arms.

      "Please sit here," he went on, "and slip your left arm into this leather sleeve. It's a little tight because it has a rubber lining, but you won't mind it after a minute or two."

      Groener walked to the chair and then drew back. "What are you going to do to me?" he asked.

      "We are going to show you some magic lantern pictures," answered the doctor.

      "Why must I sit in this chair? Why do you want my arm in that leather thing?"

      "I told you, Groener," put in the judge, "that we were coming here for the visual test; it's part of your examination. Some pictures of persons and places will be thrown on that sheet and, as each one appears, I want you to say what it is. Most of the pictures are familiar to everyone."

      "Yes, but the leather sleeve?" persisted the prisoner.

      "The leather sleeve is like the stop watch, it records your emotions. Sit down!"

      Groener hesitated and the guard pushed him toward the chair. "Wait!" he said. "I want to know how it records my emotions."

      The magistrate answered with a patience that surprised M. Paul. "There is a pneumatic arrangement," he explained, "by which the pulsations of your heart and the blood pressure in your arteries are registered—automatically. Now then! I warn you if you don't sit down willingly—well, you had better sit down."

      Coquenil was watching closely and, through the prisoner's half shut eyes, he caught a flash of anger, a quick clenching of the freed hands and then—then Groener sat down.

      Quickly and skillfully the assistant adjusted the leather sleeve over the bared left arm and drew it close with straps.

      "Not too tight," said Duprat. "You feel a sense of throbbing at first, but it is nothing. Besides, we shall take the sleeve off shortly. Now then," he turned toward the lantern.

      Immediately a familiar scene appeared upon the sheet, a colored photograph of the Place de la Concorde.

      "What is it?" asked the doctor pleasantly.

      The prisoner was silent.

      "You surely recognize this picture. Look! The obelisk and the fountain, the Tuileries gardens, the arches of the Rue de Rivoli, and the Madeleine, there at the end of the Rue Royale. Come, what is it?"

      "The Place de la Concorde," answered Groener sullenly.

      "Of course. You see how simple it is. Now another."

      The picture changed to a view of the grand opera house and at the same moment a point of light appeared in the headpiece back of the chair. It was shaded so that the prisoner could not see it and it illumined a graduated white dial on which was a glass tube about thirty inches long, the whole resembling a barometer. Inside the tube a red column moved regularly up and down, up and down, in steady beats and Coquenil understood that this column was registering the beating of Groener's heart. Standing behind the chair, the doctor, the magistrate, and the detective could at the same time watch the pulsating column and the pictures on the sheet; but the prisoner could not see the column, he did not know it was there, he saw only the pictures.

      "What is that?" asked the doctor.

      Groener had evidently decided to make the best of the situation for he answered at once: "The grand opera house."

      "Good! Now another! What is that?"

      "The Bastille column."

      "Right! And this?"

      "The Champs Elysées."

      "And this?"

      "Notre-Dame church."

      So far the beats had come uniformly about one in a second, for the man's pulse was slow; at each beat the liquid in the tube shot up six inches and then dropped six inches, but, at the view of Notre-Dame, the column rose only three inches, then dropped back and shot up seven inches.

      The doctor nodded gravely while Coquenil, with breathless interest, with a, morbid fascination, watched the beating of this red column. It was like the beating of red blood.

      "And this?"

      As the picture changed there was a quiver in the pulsating column, a hesitation with a quick fluttering at the bottom of the stroke, then the red line shot up full nine inches.

      M. Paul glanced at the sheet and saw a perfect reproduction of private room Number Six in the Ansonia. Everything was there as on the night of the crime, the delicate yellow hangings, the sofa, the table set for two. And, slowly, as they looked, two holes appeared in the wall. Then a dim shape took form upon the floor, more and more distinctly until the dissolving lens brought a man's body into clear view, a body stretched face downward in a dark red pool that grew and widened, slowly straining and wetting the polished wood.

      "Groener," said the magistrate, his voice strangely formidable in the shadows, "do you recognize this room?"

      "No," said the prisoner impassively, but the column was pulsing wildly.

      "You have been in this room?"

      "Never."

      "Nor looked through these eyeholes?"

      "No."

      "Nor seen that man lying on the floor?"

      "No."

      Now the prisoner's heart was beating evenly again, somehow he had regained his self-possession.

      "You are lying, Groener," accused the judge. "You remember this man perfectly. Come, we will lift him from the floor and look him in the face, full in the face. There!" He signaled the lantern operator and there leaped forth on the sheet the head of Martinez, the murdered, mutilated head with shattered eye and painted cheeks and the greenish death pallor showing underneath. A ghastly, leering cadaver in collar and necktie, dressed up and photographed at the morgue, and now flashed hideously at the prisoner out of the darkness. Yet Groener's heart pulsed on steadily with only a slight quickening, with less quickening than Coquenil felt in his own heart.

      "Who is it?" demanded the judge.

      "I don't know," declared the accused.

      Again the picture changed.

      "Who is this?"

      "Napoleon Bonaparte."

      "And this?"

      "Prince Bismarck."

      "And this?"

      "Queen Victoria."

      Here, suddenly, at the view of England's peaceful sovereign, Groener seemed thrown into frightful agitation, not Groener as he sat on the chair, cold and self-contained, but Groener as revealed by the unsuspected dial. Up and down in mad excitement leaped the red column with many little breaks and quiverings at the bottom of the beats and with tremendous up-shootings as if the frightened heart were trying to burst the tube with its spurting red jet.

      The doctor put his mouth close to Coquenil's ear and whispered: "It's the shock showing now, the shock that he held back after the body."

      Then he leaned over Groener's shoulder and asked kindly: "Do you feel your heart beating fast, my friend?"

      "No," murmured the prisoner, "my—my heart is beating as usual."

      "You will certainly recognize the next picture," pursued the judge. "It shows a woman and a little girl! There! Do you know these faces, Groener?"

      As he spoke there appeared the fake photograph that Coquenil had found in Brussels, Alice at the age of twelve with the smooth young widow.

      The prisoner shook his head. "I don't know them—I never saw them."

      "Groener,"

Скачать книгу