Word: marga
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Knife Wounds. In 1932, Marga decided to visit forbidden Mecca. Without further ado, she divorced her count and married a devout Moslem. As the couple started on their pilgrimage to the Holy City, her husband's tribe-resentful of his marriage to an infidel-kidnaped them both. For weeks Marga was held captive in the mountains. Then one day her sheik was found poisoned. The Moslems promptly found Marga guilty and ordered her stoned to death. Only the intervention of Ibn Saud saved her life...
Then she remarried the count. Shortly afterward he, too, was found dead, stabbed in the back with 19 knife thrusts. Investigation failed to involve Marga (though two French officers who had cast doubt on her testimony charged that she later tried to run over them in her car). Just before the outbreak of World War II, Marga turned up in a French villa close to the Spanish border. Newspapers hinted that she was trafficking with the Nazis. But after the Nazi occupation, Marga went to North Africa. There rumors connected her with British and French secret operations...
...Paris, comfortably settled in a small apartment, where her nephew, Raymond Clerisse, a young French lawyer, sometimes dropped in for an apéritif. One day Marga had an especially pleasant visit from Raymond. As he was going, she pressed a small piece of candy into his mouth. "Merci," said Raymond and departed. Later he was seized with fearful cramps. He had just enough strength to scribble on the back of a métro ticket: "The candy Marga gave me tasted strange." A few days later he was dead. Police called on Marga, but soon dropped the case...
Last fortnight, in the luxurious apartment in Nice which she shares with her son Jacques, a Communist editor, Marga and three friends were rudely interrupted at lunch by dead Raymond's ghost. Three gendarmes arrested Marga on suspicion of murder...
...will be back," said one friend confidently, as they carted the countess off. "She is one of the most sensitively artistic persons I've ever met, incapable of hurting a fly." But Marga's florist shook her head. "A strange customer, that one," she said. "Always asked for flowers past the bloom...