The three of us went into the living room, Gladys refusing help as she carried the champagne bucket. Harriet took a look at Gladys’ eyeballs and was about to say something. “It’s nothing,” I said. “All it does is enable the eyes to see through—is this dress of yours wool?”
“It is,” said Harriet.
“Wool,” I said.
“You mean woof!” she said.
“I mean I never really appreciated your figure before this.”
“Really, Henry, darling,” Harriet murmured.
I popped my eyes at her, plumped down into a chair and took the newspapers Siegman had brought back. Then I popped my eyes again. The way things had been happening that day, I’d practically forgotten the robbery, but the papers were full of it. The cops had given us an idea of the magnitude of the crime, but here in cold print it was really staggering.
“MOB KILLS TWO IN 3 MILLION WATERFRONT ROBBERY!”
“HARBOR GUNFIGHT LEAVES 2 DEAD, GOLD MILLIONS MISSING!”
One of the papers had a last minute bulletin on the front page adding that a third guard, previously reported among the four wounded, had died since. The other three were still in critical condition—the nature of the weapons used by the robbers, sub-machine guns and shotguns, and the ruthlessness with which all the guards had been mowed down, indicated calculation to leave no survivors—and it added up to the fact that the police had been unable to do much questioning or get more than perfunctory details of the crime. But the newspaper artists had outdone themselves with imaginary pictures of the robbery and maps full of X’s marking spots. There were interviews with the D.A., with high police officials, with learned detective story writers and special crime correspondents, and even with the one or two watchmen who knew absolutely nothing except that they had been asleep somewhere in the area. There were also a page of photographs of some very interesting faces, all with numbers underneath of known criminals at large who were considered capable of the robbery—which was perhaps the saddest testimonial to how little the police had to work with.
It was a crime to stir the imagination—almost three and a half million dollars worth of solid gold ingots taken off a ship while an armored car and six armed guards stood by—but the last years I’d spent in Europe had been full of stories that made this one pale by comparison. The Army was still tracking down a lot of war loot, there were still vast treasures missing, and now and then when a cache of ten million or so was uncovered, it wasn’t considered terribly exciting on the other side.
All it meant to me was that a small and unnecessary and harmful mention of Myshkin had gotten into these stories. The police had nothing to say, and when a watchman could be interviewed, the sidelight of a nut working on a nutty invention in the crime sector was worth a paragraph. A cop—it could be someone like Nulty—had probably milked ten bucks from a reporter for telling him about Myshkin, but later on, long after the crime would be solved and forgotten, those who knew Myshkin would remember that he had been carted off to the psychopathic ward for observation.
I threw the papers down and observed Gladys taking a sip from the bucket, but Harriet was leaning out the window in a pose that was much more fun to watch, and that got me thinking about whether it would do me any good to get her to drink some of the stuff herself. Just as this thought began to wander into an enticing bypath, she turned from the window and gave me a look that convinced me telepathy had arrived.
I was wrong—Siegman and Roscoe Cramwell had arrived—and Harriet had seen them emerging from a cab downstairs. She went to the door and I got ready to grab Gladys at the first sign of panic.
But I was wrong again, because when the door opened and Roscoe Cramwell’s voice boomed through the house, all Gladys did was look up at me and remark, “Darling, doesn’t that sound like Roscoe?” and take another sip while her long lashes fluttered.
Then Roscoe came in—well, he didn’t exactly come in, he was supported in. He had one arm locked around Siegman’s neck and the other was being held up by Harriet. His face was as exciting as an Italian sunset, and rather more spectacular. He walked with the gait of a man who had learned that sidewalks are often a compound of jelly, and that floors are given to unpredictable swinging and swaying. His handsome spade beard was gathered halfway up and tied with a blue ribbon from which hung an enameled badge with the words: First Prize, Doberman Pinscher Section. Some time earlier that day he had been impeccably dressed for a funeral, with striped trousers, grey vest and frock coat, but he was now a large mass of tastefully sprinkled sawdust flakes and streaks of dry beer foam. If he had worn a hat, it was missing, and so were his shoes—and so, for that matter, were his socks. He was an arresting personage, you might say.
Most of his motor functions had long since ceased to operate, but his vocal chords were in superb fettle. “Where is Gladys?” he boomed. “Lead me to her and let me die! The wizard promised me life until I behold her once again, then soft will my breath depart!”
By then I’d gotten enough of his breath to know that it would take more than a wizard to make it depart. He stared directly at Gladys, but it was impossible for him to focus on anything more than a foot distant. “I know she must be here!” he roared. “The atmosphere crackles with the magic of her presence, and all—”
“Alfred, darling,” said Gladys, “where is Mr. Myshkin?”
At the sound of her voice, Cramwell bellowed, tore himself loose from Siegman, took two steps and pitched forward full length on the floor with a thud that must have registered on the Fordham seismographs. He rolled over on his back, adjusted the ribbon and its badge, closed his eyes, and huge tears rolled down his glowing countenance. I could have sworn his tears had a head on them.
“Am I dead?” he wept. “Someone phone the wizard and find out.”
“Gladys, darling,” said Harriet, “you’re not going to let him lie there?”
“Pooh,” said Gladys, stirring the bucket with a dainty finger.
“How heartless darling,” said Harriet.
“Darling, if you only knew what is in my heart,” said Gladys softly.
“It’s only a matter of hours before he’s no longer with us, darling,” said Harriet. “Isn’t that so, Dr. Siegman?”
“Maybe minutes,” said Siegman. “Darling, he should be comforted,” said Harriet.
“Nice Roscoe,” said Gladys. “Good Roscoe, sweet Roscoe, fine Roscoe.”
“Oh, I can’t bear to watch this touching scene,” said Harriet. “Hold his hand while he breathes his last, darling.”
“Goodbye, Roscoe,” said Gladys, reaching out to touch his hand.
The next instant she let out a shriek as Cramwell’s enormous paw gripped her fingers. “He’s crushing me!” she wailed. “Make him let go!”
She kept howling until Siegman came over and stood on Cramwell’s chest. He eased his hold a trifle then, but he didn’t let go. He just lay there, tears coursing down his cheeks, his chest rising and falling gently, and Siegman standing on his chest moved up and down with him.
“Make him let go,” Gladys pleaded. “He once held my hand for thirty-six hours in a rowboat!”
“How well I remember it, darling,” Harriet sighed.
“You’ll just have to put him to bed,” said Siegman, ascending, “and let nature take its course.”
“Not with me!” cried Gladys.
“Shame,” said Siegman, descending. “I am talking of rigor mortis.”
“You’re wasting valuable time,” said Cramwell, sweetly.
Well, we loaded him on a tea caddy and wheeled him into a bedroom. He didn’t let go of Gladys, but neither did he molest her. A few minutes later, when I brought in the champagne bucket she’d asked for, she was sitting in a chair beside him, evidently resigned to letting him hold her hand. He seemed asleep but I knew he wasn’t. It would be for only a little while, she said, because wasn’t Mr. Mys
hkin coming with Boris and his friend? And she was satisfied that they would know what to do.
So I agreed and left the room and started walking down the corridor to join Harriet and Siegman, and I saw the door to the apartment open slowly and in came Myshkin, in robe and pajamas, without a sound.
* * * *
“Shhhhhh,” Myshkin said, putting a finger to his lips. He took his key out of the lock, then reached out into the hallway for a small cardboard package that weighed him down surprisingly, closed the door and met me at the entrance to the living room.
How strange it was, the quiet way both Siegman and Harriet received him—and how understandable. Siegman was engrossed in the newspapers when he happened to glance up and see us. All he did was put the paper down. A moment later, Harriet turned to Siegman, probably to address a remark, and followed his gaze. When she saw us, she closed her eyes, then opened them again and said nothing. I understood their reaction because I shared it. It was as if we had known all along that in one way or another we were inextricably bound up with Myshkin. The silence with which we greeted him was our admission of hopelessness, our acquiescence to fate.
But the flame in Myshkin’s eyes was fiercer than ever. It had been bigger, maybe, and wilder, but this was something else… like the difference between a bonfire and flame jetting under pressure, purposeful, enormously intense, well controlled.
“Is Gladys still here?” he asked quietly.
“Yes,” I said.
That was all he wanted to hear. He walked into the living room ahead of me with springy steps and sat down on the piano bench. When he put his cardboard package on the rug, it sank deep into the nap, as if it was concrete. Gladys had left half a glassful of the Creation on an end table near him; he seized it and let it slide down his gullet with greedy ease. Then he ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, scrutinized the empty glass, set it down reluctantly and made a slight movement with his shoulders, like a man in from a blizzard feeling the welcome of a fireside. When he opened his robe we could see that his pajamas were almost completely covered with yellow splotches—not the fine powdery spray that had been on Harriet’s coat, but large areas that seemed to have soaked through the fabric and stiffened as it dried. In the small breast pocket of his pajamas there was a pair of green spectacles.
“I don’t suppose any of you thought to bring along that test tube?”
“No,” I said.
“That’s par for the course,” he said. “One yes and one no.”
“How did you get in here?” said Harriet.
“I have a key,” said Myshkin. “Forgive me, Miss Hopper, I’ve had it all along. I never used it before, on my word.” No one said anything, and after a pause he said, “I wish we had that test tube. Not that—”
“Is Boris really with you?” said Siegman.
“Do you see him?” said Myshkin.
“No,” said Siegman. “Is he in that box at your feet?”
“What a happy thought,” said Myshkin, almost smiling. “No, Doctor.”
“Didn’t you tell Gladys you were expecting him?”
“That was downtown, at my place,” said Myshkin. “If Gladys had come, I would have let Boris track me there. Alone, I wouldn’t dare. That green compound in the test tube may work—I have a very good feeling, in fact, that it will—but when it comes to taking chances at this stage of the game, no. For me, so far, the best answer is Gladys. By the way, where is she?”
“Resting in the bedroom,” I said.
“Excellent,” said Myshkin. “I want her at full strength.”
“Then you were keeping us at your place because of Gladys?” I asked.
“It was not obvious?” said Myshkin.
“And not the test tube with the compound?” I went on.
“Henry, my friend, I answered that question.”
“Answer it again.”
“The compound, yes. But first this magnificent specimen of womanhood, Miss Gladys De Winter.”
“Why her?”
“Ah, if I only knew,” Myshkin sighed, and this time he did smile. “Not that I don’t have what I consider an extremely exciting conjecture. Give me a cigarette, please.” He lit and talked with smoke pouring out of his smile. “You know sooner or later, in all scientific inquiries, when one goes far enough, the final result is always the same—the big question, the staggering question, the question that humbles us all, the question that drives us to laboratories, or to drink, or to church—the question that unites us with bedbugs and bacteria, with sunlight and seaweed. Even to ask it requires the presumption of an idiot, but of course, since we are all idiots in the face of this question, we ask it as casually as we ask the time of day…”
“And this question?” I said.
“What is life?” said Myshkin.
“A good question.” said Siegman. “You have an answer, perhaps?”
“What is life?” Myshkin repeated, paying not the slightest attention to Siegman. “This question occurred to the first man who looked up at the sky and was capable of an uneasy suspicion of infinity. Ages later, when he had learned to make lenses, the suspicion began to be documented. If he turned the lens around, almost in avoidance of his big question, and searched down within his world, the result was the same. It is still the same. The telescope and the microscope keep trying to find a boundary, but they only push it farther away. The next telescope will discover another beyond, and so will the next microscope. The telescope will find ever extending universes, suns beyond the suns beyond the suns. The microscope will find—What has it found? Chromosomes? And beyond? Genes. And beyond? But they have broken the genes into parts, and those parts into parts. Still the answer is the same. But this is not to say that nothing is learned. There is a big thing to be learned—the bigness of this question. If that alone is learned, already man knows as much as he will ever know. But there are also small things to be learned—small, practical things, though they may be of great value to us in the living of our lives. We can never know the essences, but paradoxically, we can use them. Some day man will go a million times further into the nature of a bacterium, and discover that he can go still ten million times further. But meanwhile he will have helped someone’s cold, or dandruff, or teeth. The path of his progress will be marked by his destruction of plagues and pestilences, but the path will go on and on.”
And he smoked with great relish. I don’t deny it was impressive, and in more than one way. It was not only what he was saying, but the ease and the relaxation in his manner, and the queer thing about it was that instead of contradicting, it complemented the intense, controlled ferocity that I had felt in him when he first came into the room. He was not only a far different Myshkin from the one I had met on my homecoming, but quite different Myshkin from the one I had left at home a few years ago.
“And this,” Myshkin went on after a pause, “is by way of answering your question, Henry, and I do not feel particularly that I am coming from the sublime. Why Gladys De Winter? I don’t know. But I have a great suspicion that she has an essence that is very rarely found in such purity in nature. And, as I have said, one does not have to know essence to be able to use it. My feeling is that Gladys represents something that is amazingly, magnificently, mysteriously, overwhelmingly useful to me—and to all of us, since we are together in this fantastic sweep of events.”
“I wish I could feel that I understood,” I said.
“You’ll understand it when you see it.”
“But will I see it?”
“I think so,” said Myshkin. “I can almost make it a promise.” He moved his shoulders again. “You know, that was quite a drink I had here. What was it? The strangest flavor…”
“I made it expressly for Gladys,” I said, “but if I had to do it—”
Just then Gladys’ voice floated out of the bedroom, down the corridor and in to us. “Hark
, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings…” It was a miracle of timing, and Myshkin’s face creased with a warm, joyous smile.
“How pure, how pure,” he murmured. “Henry, I could kiss you.”
“She’s back in her manic cycle,” said Siegman. “Maybe she broke loose?”
Myshkin stiffened. “What do you mean broke loose? What’s this?”
“I’ll see,” said Harriet, leaving the room.
“Don’t get excited,” I said, and I told him briefly what we’d done.
But Myshkin was on his feet halfway through it. “Don’t you understand?” he said. “She must be free and close at hand! The bedroom is perfect, but she must be free! I’ll saw that actor’s arm off if I have to! Miss Hopper,” he said to Harriet as she came back, “what’s going on in there?”
“It’s all right,” she said, sitting down wearily. “She’s been giving him that drink and he let go of her. Now he’s putting on my best robe and she’s going to pack a bath towel with ice cubes for his head. Henry, I don’t know what you put in the champagne bucket, but be a darling and bring me some of it.”
“I’ll go,” said Myshkin.
“You stay put,” I told him. “This is fine—you’re happy because she’s free, and we’re free because she’s happy. I’ll let her know you’re here and I’ll even tell her that Boris and his playmate are coming. Anything for more of this peace and quiet.”
But going down the corridor it occurred to me that Myshkin hadn’t really made clear his expectations concerning Boris, let alone the gunman. He’d said he would have let Boris track him to his place if Gladys had come there—but he had an equivalent set-up now—so if Boris was following him, why not here? But that wasn’t the only question Myshkin had avoided. Even at his mellowest and most loquacious, his conversations were like a bee’s flight in a field of clover—he took a little honey here, touched there, moving fast and not nearly as erratically as one might think, and if you tried to examine him a little more closely, you had a good chance of winding up stung.
Gladys was in the kitchen, emptying the ice trays in a folded bath towel. I took a few cubes and glasses and told her about Myshkin. She asked about Boris and his darling friend before I could get to it, and I said that was all right too, they were on their way. She told me all about the lark again and we went into the bedroom. There was Cramwell sitting propped up with pillows against the headboard. He was still drunk enough to disgrace a Bowery gutter, but would you believe it?—that Creation of mine had actually improved him a little. He was wearing a lovely flowing blue silk gown, with a high Chinese collar that made his chins stand up and had the beard, ribbon and all, jutting out at a forty-five degree angle. The gown was covered with beautifully embroidered stars and ringed planets, and when Gladys finished winding the bath towel around his head, turban fashion, he looked like a high class swami that someone had had stuffed and taken home to keep in the Trophy Room.
The Mad Scientist Megapack Page 15
