“You still looking for God?”
“Yeah.”
“An all-powerful Being? Great Oneness, Creator of the Universe? First Cause of All Things?”
“That’s right.”
“Somebody with that description just showed up at the morgue. You better get down here right away.”
It was Him all right, and from the looks of Him it was a professional job.
“He was dead when they brought Him in.”
“Where’d you find Him?”
“A warehouse on Delancey Street.”
“Any clues?”
“It’s the work of an existentialist. We’re sure of that.”
“How can you tell?”
“Haphazard way how it was done. Doesn’t seem to be any system followed. Impulse.”
“A crime of passion?”
“You got it. Which means you’re a suspect, Kaiser.”
“Why me?”
“Everybody down at headquarters knows how you feel about Jaspers.”
“That doesn’t make me a killer.”
“Not yet, but you’re a suspect.”
Outside on the street I sucked air into my lungs and tried to clear my head. I took a cab over to Newark and got out and walked a block to Giordino’s Italian Restaurant. There, at a back table, was His Holiness. It was the Pope, all right. Sitting with two guys I had seen in half a dozen police line-ups.
“Sit down,” he said, looking up from his fettucine. He held out a ring. I gave him my toothiest smile, but didn’t kiss it. It bothered him and I was glad. Point for me.
“Would you like some fettucine?”
“No thanks, Holiness. But you go ahead.”
“Nothing? Not even a salad?”
“I just ate.”
“Suit yourself, but they make a great Roquefort dressing here. Not like at the Vatican, where you can’t get a decent meal.”
“I’ll come right to the point, Pontiff. I’m looking for God.”
“You came to the right person.”
“Then He does exist?” They all found this very amusing and laughed. The hood next to me said, “Oh, that’s funny. Bright boy wants to know if He exists.”
I shifted my chair to get comfortable and brought the leg down on his little toe. “Sorry.” But he was steaming.
“Sure He exists, Lupowitz, but I’m the only one that communicates with him. He speaks only through me.”
“Why you, pal?”
“Because I got the red suit.”
“This get-up?”
“Don’t knock it. Every morning I rise, put on this red suit, and suddenly I’m a big cheese. It’s all in the suit. I mean, face it, if I went around in slacks and a sports jacket, I couldn’t get arrested religion-wise.”
“Then it’s a hype. There’s no God.”
“I don’t know. But what’s the difference? The money’s good.”
“You ever worry the laundry won’t get your red suit back on time and you’ll be like the rest of us?”
“I use the special one-day service. I figure it’s worth the extra few cents to be safe.”
“Name Claire Rosensweig mean anything to you?”
“Sure. She’s in the science department at Bryn Mawr.”
“Science, you say? Thanks.”
“For what?”
“The answer, Pontiff.” I grabbed a cab and shot over the George Washington Bridge. On the way I stopped at my office and did some fast checking. Driving to Claire’s apartment, I put the pieces together, and for the first time they fit. When I got there she was in a diaphanous peignoir and something seemed to be troubling her.
“God is dead. The police were here. They’re looking for you. They think an existentialist did it.”
“No, sugar. It was you.”
“What? Don’t make jokes, Kaiser.”
“It was you that did it.”
“What are you saying?”
“You, baby. Not Heather Butkiss or Claire Rosensweig, but Doctor Ellen Shepherd.”
“How did you know my name?”
“Professor of physics at Bryn Mawr. The youngest one ever to head a department there. At the midwinter Hop you get stuck on a jazz musician who’s heavily into philosophy. He’s married, but that doesn’t stop you. A couple of nights in the hay and it feels like love. But it doesn’t work out because something comes between you. God. Y’see, sugar, he believed, or wanted to, but you, with your pretty little scientific mind, had to have absolute certainty.”
“No, Kaiser, I swear.”
“So you pretend to study philosophy because that gives you a chance to eliminate certain obstacles. You get rid of Socrates easy enough, but Descartes takes over, so you use Spinoza to get rid of Descartes, but when Kant doesn’t come through you have to get rid of him too.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“You made mincemeat out of Leibnitz, but that wasn’t good enough for you because you knew if anybody believed Pascal you were dead, so he had to be gotten rid of too, but that’s where you make your mistake because you trusted Martin Buber. Except, sugar, he was soft. He believed in God, so you had to get rid of God yourself.”
“Kaiser, you’re mad!”
“No, baby. You posed as a pantheist and that gave you access to Him—if He existed, which he did. He went with you to Shelby’s party and when Jason wasn’t looking, you killed Him.”
“Who the hell are Shelby and Jason?”
“What’s the difference? Life’s absurd now anyway.”
“Kaiser,” she said, suddenly trembling. “You wouldn’t turn me in?”
“Oh yes, baby. When the Supreme Being gets knocked off, somebody’s got to take the rap.”
“Oh, Kaiser, we could go away together. Just the two of us. We could forget about philosophy. Settle down and maybe get into semantics.”
“Sorry, sugar. It’s no dice.”
She was all tears now as she started lowering the shoulder straps of her peignoir and I was standing there suddenly with a naked Venus whose whole body seemed to be saying, Take me—I’m yours. A Venus whose right hand tousled my hair while her left hand had picked up a forty-five and was holding it behind my back. I let go with a slug from my thirty-eight before she could pull the trigger, and she dropped her gun and doubled over in disbelief.
“How could you, Kaiser?”
She was fading fast, but I managed to get it in, in time.
“The manifestation of the universe as a complex idea unto itself as opposed to being in or outside the true Being of itself is inherently a conceptual nothingness or Nothingness in relation to any abstract form of existing or to exist or having existed in perpetuity and not subject to laws of physicality or motion or ideas relating to nonmatter or the lack of objective Being or subjective otherness.”
It was a subtle concept but I think she understood before she died.
What! Not a Christmas story, you say? I refer you to the winner of the fifth race at Aqueduct.
“Then Mrs. Cratchit entered, smiling proudly, with the pudding. Oh. a wonderful pudding! Shaped like a cannonball, blazing in half-a-quartern of ignited brandy bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top, and stuffed full with plums and sweetmeats and sodium diacetate and monoglyceride and potassium bromate and aluminum phosphate and calcium phosphate monobasic and chloromine T and aluminum potassium sulfate and calcium propionate and sodium alginate and butylated hydroxyanisole and...”
Robin Hood’s Epitaph
Hear undernead dis laith stean
Laiz Robert Earl of Huntington
Nea arcir uer az hie sa geude:
An piple kaud im Robin Heud.
Sic utlawz as hi an iz men,
Wil England never sigh agen.
Obiit 24 kal. Decembris, 1247.
From a gravestone in
Kirklees Churchyard,Yorkshire.
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
It is by now catechismic that Conan Doy
le wrote the first of his Sherlock Holmes stories while waiting for his medical practice to grow. He must have enjoyed those early works as a welcome relief from the world of intractable physical ailments. What better escape for him after a day of gas pains and ‘the vapors’ than to open his sketchbook and let his mind wander through the corridors of Baskerville Hall or the moors outside Dartmoor Prison. It provided some needed diversion; it also helped to pay the bills.
No wonder that, when these stories became a chore done at public demand, he considered killing off his detective. The magic and escape were gone. Sherlock Holmes became another obligation not unlike the practice of medicine itself. He turned to mysticism and science fiction, but the public would not have it. They wanted Holmes.
Today these adventures provide a wonderful escape for the contemporary reader. And that, of course, is what detective fiction is largely about: a chance to forget one’s own problems and take on those of the royal house of Bohemia or the Red-Headed League.
In that spirit, let us take down our pipes and deerstalker caps, and join the world’s greatest consulting detective as he sets off on another adventure down the gas-lit streets of Edwardian England. This time he proposes to cook someone’s goose. Or will he? Take a gander at “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.”
I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. Beside the couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a very seedy and disreputable hard-felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked in several places. A lens and a forceps lying upon the seat of the chair suggested that the hat had been suspended in this manner for the purpose of examination.
“You are engaged,” said I; “perhaps I interrupt you.”
“Not at all. I am glad to have a friend with whom I can discuss my results. The matter is a perfectly trivial one”—he jerked his thumb in the direction of the old hat—”but there are points in connection with it which are not entirely devoid of interest and even of instruction.”
I seated myself in his armchair and warmed my hands before his crackling fire, for a sharp frost had set in, and the windows were thick with the ice crystals. “I suppose,” I remarked, “that, homely as it looks, this thing has some deadly story linked on to it—that it is the clue which will guide you in the solution of some mystery and the punishment of some crime.”
“No. no. No crime,” said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. “Only one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles. Amid the action and reaction of so dense a swarm of humanity, every possible combination of events may be expected to take place, and many a little problem will be presented which may be striking and bizarre without being criminal. We have already had experience of such.”
“So much so,” I remarked, “that of the last six cases which I have added to my notes, three have been entirely free of any legal crime.”
“Precisely. You allude to my attempt to recover the Irene Adler papers, to the singular case of Miss Mary Sutherland, and to the adventure of the man with the twisted lip. Well, I have no doubt that this small matter will fall into the same innocent category. You know Peterson, the commissionaire?”
“Yes.”
“It is to him that this trophy belongs.”
“It is his hat.”
“No, no; he found it. Its owner is unknown. I beg that you will look upon it not as a battered billycock but as an intellectual problem. And, first, as to how it came here. It arrived upon Christmas morning, in company with a good fat goose, which is, I have no doubt, roasting at this moment in front of Peterson’s fire. The facts are these: about four o’clock on Christmas morning, Peterson, who, as you know, is a very honest fellow, was returning from some small jollification and was making his way homeward down Tottenham Court Road. In front of him he saw, in the gaslight, a tallish man, walking with a slight stagger, and carrying a white goose slung over his shoulder. As he reached the corner of Goodge Street, a row broke out between this stranger and a little knot of roughs. One of the latter knocked off the man’s hat, on which he raised his stick to defend himself, and swinging it over his head, smashed the shop window behind him. Peterson had rushed forward to protect the stranger from his assailants; but the man, shocked at having broken the window, and seeing an official-looking person in uniform rushing towards him, dropped his goose, took to his heels, and vanished amid the labyrinth of small streets which lie at the back of Tottenham Court Road. The roughs had also fled at the appearance of Peterson, so that he was left in possession of the field of battle, and also of the spoils of victory in the shape of this battered hat and a most unimpeachable Christmas goose.”
“Which surely he restored to their owner?”
“My dear fellow, there lies the problem. It is true that ‘For Mrs. Henry Baker’ was printed upon a small card which was tied to the bird’s left leg, and it is also true that the initials ‘H. B.’ are legible upon the lining of this hat; but as there are some thousands of Bakers, and some hundreds of Henry Bakers in this city of ours, it is not easy to restore lost property to any of them.”
“What, then, did Peterson do?”
“He brought round both hat and goose to me on Christmas morning, knowing that even the smallest problems are of interest to me. The goose we retained until this morning, when there were signs that, in spite of the slight frost, it would be well that it should be eaten without unnecessary delay. Its finder has carried it off, therefore, to fulfil the ultimate destiny of a goose, while I continue to retain the hat of the unknown gentleman who lost his Christmas dinner.”
“Did he not advertise?”
“No.”
“Then, what clue could you have as to his identity?”
“Only as much as we can deduce.”
“From his hat?”
“Precisely.”
“But you are joking. What can you gather from this old battered felt?”
“Here is my lens. You know my methods. What can you gather yourself as to the individuality of the man who has worn this article?”
I took the tattered object in my hands and turned it over rather ruefully. It was a very ordinary black hat of the usual round shape, hard and much the worse for wear. The lining had been of red silk, but was a good deal discoloured. There was no maker’s name; but. as Holmes had remarked, the initials “H. B.” were scrawled upon one side. It was pierced in the brim for a hat-securer, but the elastic was missing. For the rest, it was cracked, exceedingly dusty, and spotted in several places, although there seemed to have been some attempt to hide the discoloured patches by smearing them with ink.
“I can see nothing,” said I, handing it back to my friend.
“On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see. You are too timid in drawing your inferences.”
“Then, pray tell me what it is that you can infer from this hat?”
He picked it up and gazed at it in the peculiar introspective fashion which was characteristic of him. “It is perhaps less suggestive than it might have been,” he remarked, “and yet there are a few inferences which are very distinct, and a few others which represent at least a strong balance of probability. That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him.”
“My dear Holmes!”
“He has, howe
ver, retained some degree of self-respect,” he continued, disregarding my remonstrance. “He is a man who leads a sedentary life, goes out little, is out of training entirely, is middle-aged, has grizzled hair which he has had cut within the last few days, and which he anoints with lime-cream. These are the more patent facts which are to be deduced from his hat. Also, by the way, that it is extremely improbable that he has gas laid on in his house.”
“You are certainly joking. Holmes.”
“Not in the least. Is it possible that even now, when I give you these results, you are unable to see how they are attained?”
“I have no doubt that I am very stupid, but I must confess that I am unable to follow you. For example, how did you deduce that this man was intellectual?”
For answer Holmes clapped the hat upon his head. It came right over the forehead and settled upon the bridge of his nose. “It is a question of cubic capacity,” said he; “a man with so large a brain must have something in it.”
“The decline of his fortunes, then?”
“This hat is three years old. These flat brims curled at the edge came in then. It is a hat of the very best quality. Look at the band of ribbed silk and the excellent lining. If this man could afford to buy so expensive a hat three years ago, and has had no hat since, then he has assuredly gone down in the world.”
“Well, that is clear enough, certainly. But how about the foresight and the moral retrogression?”
Sherlock Holmes laughed. “Here is the foresight,” said he. putting his finger upon the little disc and loop of the hat-securer. “They are never sold upon hats. If this man ordered one. it is a sign of a certain amount of foresight, since he went out of his way to take this precaution against the wind. But since we see that he has broken the elastic and has not troubled to replace it. it is obvious that he has less foresight now than formerly, which is a distinct proof of a weakening nature. On the other hand, he has endeavored to conceal some of these stains upon the felt by daubing them with ink, which is a sign that he has not entirely lost his self-respect.”
Thomas Godfrey (Ed) Page 3
