A dried, mummified human head, wrinkled and shrunken, a Patagonian relic, hung by its hair from a cluster of arrows. And this, attracting my eye to the library table over which that gruesome trophy hung, drew me to the table itself. I picked up from the inestimable Kurdish rug which covered its top a thick book, leatherbound, and emblazoned with a peacock.

“Hell’s fire! It’s bound in human skin!”

“So it is,” agreed Pierre. “I wondered how long it would take you to recognize human hide when it was tanned. You passed up that little drum without noticing it.”

And then Pierre thumbed the pages, began to read to himself. Glancing over his shoulder, I saw that he well spared himself the trouble of reading aloud. The book was either in Arabic or Persian, neither of which I could understand.

As Pierre read, and fumed, and muttered, apparently quite interested, I devoted myself to the one bright spot in that necrophagous apartment: a painting in oils, a portrait of a young woman, lovely beyond all description, with smoldering, Babylonic eyes, full, delicately sensuous lips; fine features whose every line and curve bespoke calm, aristocratic insolence. And this smiled from a cluster of swords and was enshrined in an atmosphere of death and doom, and gruesome relics! Whether or not the kidnapper of a mummy, this marquis was surely a freak.

Pierre’s smile, as he laid down the book he had been reading, resembled that of a cat who has just had a pleasant tête-à-tête with the canary. Whether the worthy marquis had expressed his unusual humor by having a book of Arabic jests bound in human hide, I couldn’t say, but Pierre seemed on the inside of something which had been evading him.

The portrait caught his eye.

“Very lovely. Yes, I met her, twenty years ago, shortly before her untimely death. His last mistress.”

Death … death … even that loveliness enshrined by morbid trophies was itself a memento of death. I shuddered, chilled, despite the sun’s slanting rays which warmed and illumined that necrophiliac room.

“And he sleeps here. Or is this but an antique, a decoration?”

I glanced again at the lordly bed, half expecting to find festoons of skulls about the canopy, fringes of scalp locks, strands of teeth. Then I noted an unnatural curvature of the drawn curtains, something which forced them forward, and out of their natural drape.

“Que diable! Another mummy! And no case to match.”

D’Artois took from his vest pocket his tapeline, took measurements, compared them with his notebook; studied the wrappings, the markings.

“The very lady!”

I advanced to pick up the aged beauty. Simplicity, this quest. And this, after all Pierre’s halo of mystery!

“Jamais! Pas du tout! We must locate the case; all or nothing. If we alarm him, who knows what may happen to the case? Allons!”