The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur Detectives

Containing a nervous cavalier with frightened eyes—Introducing a mysterious and puritanical satyr—And discussing the tired ghosts that haunted the heart of Julien De Medici.

In the firelight the face of Julien De Medici appeared like a gray and scarlet mask of ennui. Oblivious of the ornamental room with its pattern of books, statues and tapestries, he sat stiffly in the carved wooden chair and stared at the burning logs. He was waiting for his host, Victor Ballau.

Except for the crackling of the burning wood, the room was still. Cowled shadows reared witch-like shapes across the walls and ceiling.

It was night outside. Wind quarreled with the stone buildings. Removing his eyes reluctantly from the burning logs, De Medici glanced at the darkness of the empty room. He studied the shadows with frightened eyes.

He was a curious man of thirty. An aristocratic ugliness marked his face. The long, thin nose, the high cheek-bones, the wide, inanimate mouth and the green-tinted skin gave him a lithographic rather than human air. His black hair was cut in a straight line across his forehead. He wore it unparted in such a manner that it made an almost square frame for the elongated rigidity of his face.

A striking and bizarre figure, poised, precise and seemingly of another world, he lived chiefly in his eyes. They were narrow and black, symmetrical to a point of artificiality. But under the parenthesis of the brows lived a startling man.

From the carved chair before the burning logs, De Medici studied the shadows. He disliked darkness and empty rooms. Shadows frightened him. Opened doors chilled him. Yet his immobile face smiled derisively.

“Fear,” he thought. “It’s like a disease.”

He smiled again as if amused at the emotion disturbing him.

“Ghosts,” he continued to himself. His eyes were on the opened door in the shadows at the end of the room. “Ghosts walk around inside me.”

And he fell to thinking of an old subject—of the ghosts that prowled the mysterious corridors of his soul.... De Medici—ah, what a name! A sarcophagus of evil....

He recalled with a shudder the excitement of the critics who had written about the opening of his play at Victor Ballau’s theater two weeks ago. One of them in particular had given him a bad hour. A discerning fellow.... He remembered the critic’s phrases:

“... and now a De Medici turned dramatist. What a name to conjure with! One needs no genealogical chart to assure one that here in Julien De Medici writing plays for Broadway is a descendant of those monstrous and evil adventurers whose villainies once illumined the courts of Europe....”

De Medici smiled at the memory of the words.... A bit redundant and in the grand style affected by romantically hungry puritans writing for the press.... He continued recalling the review:

“For here again is the De Medici touch. Prince Julien, who witnessed the premier of his first drama—‘The Dead Flower’—is a gentleman of exemplary habits and enviable charm. But in this play to which he has signed his name lives again the sardonic evil which once made empire builders of his family. A dreadful humor pervades this amazing work. Its characters are etched with a Satanic deftness refreshingly new—for the stage.... Prince Julien of Broadway has borrowed the soul of his great-great-great-grandmother, with which to write his first drama....”

The burning logs exploded sharply. De Medici sprang to his feet.

“Damn!” he muttered. “It’s the door.”

Walking swiftly across the shadowed room he shut the thing he fancied had frightened him. Yes, opened doors in a dark room, even a lighted room, always chilled him. They reminded him vaguely of something—of winding corridors, of hidden things waiting beyond them. He would sit, slowly terrified, watching an opened doorway, as if awaiting something, as if straining to catch a sound of clanking and wailing....

His earliest memories were those of fears. Windows, silences, doorways, darknesses, lights far away, candle-light in a mirror, winds howling, hidden noises—these were things of which he had been in terror as a boy.

It had been that way with his father, the Prince Julien of the Paris ateliers—an indifferent artist, a violent-tempered, black-haired man who had died at forty, his name a byword even to the decadent aristocracy that postured futilely among the memories of France.

Years after his death De Medici understood the tragedy of the man who had been his father. Rake and scoundrel, he had died raving in drink. A memory of debauches and black deeds had survived him. But as he grew older the De Medici son understood. These nightmares that bloomed in the recesses of his own thought, these terrors that animated the depths of his nature, had been his father’s legacy as well as his own. And, despairing of the ghosts whose whisperings darkened his life, the elder Prince Julien had fled. Drink, women, excesses—scenes of glaring lights and crazed laughter—these had been hiding-places. The notorious De Medici of the Paris ’90’s had been no more than a frightened refugee fleeing an inheritance.

Left alone in the care of a senile uncle, the boy Julien had stumbled upon a different direction for flight—literature. He had come into his estate at fifteen. At eighteen he had chosen America. France was too familiar. Its ancient roads, the dark corners of Paris, the very air he breathed haunted and frightened him.

Now, after twelve years, he had matured into a nervously brilliant man, engagingly cynical, egoistic as a child and subtle-minded as a Jesuit. Among his friends he was regarded with deference. His name, his manner, his genius combined with his wealth attired him in an unassailable superiority. They found him, however, neither arrogant nor perverse, despite the startling and often horrible plots and ideas which came from his pen. None, not even his few intimates, had ever intruded upon his secret, had ever glimpsed behind the charming and stenciled smile of Prince Julien, the “Borgian” ghosts that pantomimed in his soul.

The offending door closed, De Medici returned to his chair. He yearned to turn on the lights of the room. With the cheerful glare of the electric bulbs the dim terrors assailing him would vanish. But, as always, he treated himself to this discipline—a refusal to humor the senseless fears of his nerves. He folded his hands and smiled, regretting his action in closing the door.

A step in the corridor leading to the room lifted the tension under which he sat. Victor Ballau at last. Yet he waited, apprehensive, as the step approached, as the door slowly opened. With the familiar figure of his friend standing in the far glow of the fire, however, De Medici’s nervousness vanished.