The Club Dumas

The flash projected the outline of the hanged man onto the wall. He hung motionless from a light fixture in the center of the room, and as the photographer moved around him, taking pictures the flashes threw the silhouette onto a succession of paintings, glass cabinets full of porcelain shelves of books, open curtains framing great windows beyond which the rain was falling.

The examining magistrate was a young man. His thinning hair was untidy and still damp, as was the raincoat he wore while he dictated to a clerk who sat on a sofa while he typed, his typewriter on a chair. The tapping punctuated the monotonous voice of the magistrate and the whispered comments of the policeman who were moving about the room.

"... wearing pajamas and a robe. The cord of the robe was the cause of death by hanging. The deceased has his hands bound in front of him with a tie. On his left foot he is still wearing one of his slippers, the other foot is bare...."

The magistrate touched the slippered foot of the dead man, and the body turned slightly, slowly, at the end of the taut silk cord that ran from its neck to the light fixture on the ceiling. The body moved from left to right, then back again, until it came gradually to a stop in its original position, like the needle of a compass reverting to north. As the magistrate moved away, he turned sideways to avoid a uniformed policeman who was searching for fingerprints beneath the corpse. There was a broken vase on the floor and a book open at a page covered with red pencil marks. The book was an old copy of The Vicomte de Bragelonne, a cheap edition bound in cloth. Leaning over the policeman's shoulder, the magistrate glanced at the underlined sentences:

"They have betrayed me," he murmured. "All is known!"

"All is known at last," answered Porthos, who knew nothing.

He made the clerk write this down and ordered that the book be included in the report. Then he went to join a tall man who stood smoking by one of the open windows.

"What do you think?" he asked.

The tall man wore his police badge fastened to a pocket of his leather jacket. Before answering, he took time to finish his cigarette, then threw it over his shoulder and out the window without looking.

"If it's white and in a bottle, it tends to be milk," he answered cryptically, at last, but not so cryptically that the magistrate didn't smile slightly.

Unlike the policeman, he was looking out into the street, where it was still raining hard. Somebody opened a door on the other side of the room, and a gust of air splashed drops of water into his face.

"Shut the door," he ordered without turning around. Then he spoke to the policeman. "Sometimes homicide disguises itself as suicide."

"And vice versa," the other man pointed out calmly.

"What do you think of the hands and tie?"

"Sometimes they're afraid they'll change their minds at the last minute ... If it was homicide, he'd have had them tied behind him."

"It makes no difference," objected the magistrate. "It's a strong, thin cord. Once he lost his footing, he wouldn't have a chance, even with his hands free."

"Anything's possible. The autopsy will tell us more."

The magistrate glanced once more at the corpse. The policeman searching for fingerprints stood up with the book.

"Strange, that business of the page," said the magistrate.

The tall policeman shrugged.

"I don't read much," he said, "but Porthos, wasn't he one of those ... Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d'Artagnan." He was counting with his thumb on the fingers of the same hand. He stopped, looking thoughtful. "Funny. I've always wondered why they were called the three musketeers when there were really four of them."