Dr. Phibes

by William Goldstein

  The chant ended and the men around him stood silent, waiting expectantly. Now the lad turned and, with firm steps, led the others toward the arc. He opened the covered wooden doors with a firm hand to reveal to all who were in the congregation that morning the blue velvet-jacketed scrolls contained therein. Then he faced the audience and, his features set in new conviction, enunciated again the great principle:

  “Shema Y’Isroel, Adonai;

  Elohenu, Adonai Echod.”

  With that he strode to the lectern and waited while the men opened the scrolls to his portion.

  Trout now warmed up to the ceremony, chuckling at Ezra ben Gabirol’s fervid anxiety which caused his hands to shake and top hat to bobble as he turned to remove the bindings of the Torah. He remembered Ezra describing the painstaking effort required to get a boy ready for this event: two years during which the boy is led to a consideration of the duties and excitements of his manhood. Ezra ben Gabirol spent as much of himself in the process as he extracted, a generosity which today was notably evident in the lad’s elocution.

  The boy was singing beautifully now. He traced the words on the parchment with a small pointer, lifting his face up from time to time to see if the audience was still with him. Although Harry Trout’s knowledge of Hebrew was scant, he knew he was hearing the Story of Gideon. The tale of that extraordinary “ordinary” man seemed, to Harry Trout at any rate, particularly fitting for the occasion. He’d just gotten absorbed in the account of the battle with the Midianites when the lad stopped. At once a great relaxation rippled through the audience: the lad had come through in fine fashion. When he walked back to the arc to return the scroll, he had a definite spring to his stride.

  From that point the service moved to its conclusion in a businesslike fashion. Ezra boomed the prayers, the lad answering with newly acquired authority, and the congregation chorused over all at a frightening pace. The cantor, whose solemnity had cast an awkward foreboding on the early proceedings, was now oversung by the others at the lectern. He seemed not a little resentful at this exclusion but no one seemed to care, the lure of the elaborate luncheon spread out and waiting in the vestry rooms below seemed now to be uppermost in everyone’s mind. Trout noted that even the three patriarchs sharing the bench with him had awakened from their previous dour solemnity and were now skimming through the chants in a race to be done.

  Then it was finished. Ezra led the lad off the pulpit and walked arm-in-arm with him down the aisle, nodding greetings. Upstairs the women were chattering and weeping; the men fumbled words of salutation to each other, anxious to get out of the rigid space between the benches. Then all filed out after the rabbi in a slow processional to join the women in the hallway outside.

  Harry Trout fell in with this line which was queued up again to greet and congratulate the lad who stood shaking hands at the head of the vestry. Long, white-clothed tables had been set up against each wall on which was spread rows of silver and china platters embellished by glistening arrangements of special meat cuts, herring in wine sauce, sweet cakes and polished fruits.

  The guests were very attentive to the boy, the women hugged and kissed him, the men shook his hand long enough to slip a bank note or two into it. He showed little surprise at this method of gift-giving, slipping the bills into his free hand, and holding his hand out anew for the next in line with considerable poise.

  Most of the crowd was already seated at the tables when Harry reached the Bar Mitzvah boy. He decided to bend with the custom, sliding a one pound note into the boy’s hand as he paid respects.

  “You did fine, young man!”

  “Thank you, sir. I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

  “Meet Detective Inspector Harry Trout, Clement. Mr. Trout is with the Metropolitan Police. And, Harry, I’d like you to meet Clement Davidovici, who today has added his strong voice to this congregation.” Ben Gabirol glossed the amenities.

  “Mr. Trout is an old friend, Clement. I knew him at school.” He shook Trout’s hand and put an arm on his shoulder. “What brings you to us today, Harry?”

  “Business, Ezra, although I must say that up to now it’s been all pleasure.”

  “Won’t you have some sandwiches and cakes, Mr. Trout? I’ll join you as soon as this line’s over,” Clement piped.

  Trout smiled at the boy’s politeness.

  “Just a glass of punch, Clement, then I really must get back. Do you think you can spare the rabbi here for a few minutes?”

  The lad’s eyes widened. “It sounds like you’re on a case, Inspector. Will you tell me about it?”

  “When it’s all over. Now I’m going to try that punch.” He shook hands again with Clement, then made his way through the crowd about the punch bowl. Ezra joined him while he waited for a very fat lady with vivid rouged cheeks to ladle the red bubbly mixture into a crystal cup. He handed this to Ezra, took a second from her puffy fingers and moved to the edge of the crowd.

  “Ezra, if it is convenient, I’d like to speak with you in your study. Will they mind if you leave?”

  “No, of course not. The tension is over now. Everyone is relaxing.”

  They passed through the vestry and up a small flight of stairs to Ben Gabirol’s tiny study. On the way up, Trout skimmed over some of his recent work, preferring not to talk directly about the case. When they reached the study he at on a rough wooden chair waiting for Ben Gabirol to get settled at his desk. Instead, the rabbi paced about the meager floor space, waiting for Trout to finish. Finally he cut the inspector off.

  “Harry, you didn’t come out to the synagogue this morning on your day off, wait patiently through the venerated Bar Mitzvah ceremony, even though I might say it was done in Bristol fashion, just to bring me up to date on your brilliant, if albeit a bit stormy career? Now what do you want to tell me?”

  Trout, whose upbringing had been appropriately “old-fashioned,” retained a solemn regard for clerics. Had he not known Ezra ben Gabirol better he would have been surprised, even shocked, by his matter-of-factness. He blushed now, not at the rabbi’s candor, but rather at his own needless wordiness.

  “As always, Ezra, you get right to the point.” He flipped the amulet at the rabbi. “Without getting into its background, tell me what you can about this little trinket.”

  “That’s a Sam, the Hebrew symbol for blood.” He stopped pacing now and rolled the brass letter over in his hand. “It’s part of the G’tach.”

  “The what?”

  “The G’tach, the ten curses visited upon Pharaoh before the Exodus. Here, I’ll show you.”

  He stepped to the side wall which was lined from floor to ceiling with books of every size and shape. He searched for a moment, then pulled a heavy leather-tooled volume from the next-to-bottom shelf, and placed it on a pedestal.

  “As you know, the Jewish people lived for many generations in Egypt where they were treated with more or less hospitality, depending on the whim of the man on the throne and the practical politics of the times. During the time of Ramses II their condition worsened considerably, probably because of his construction project at Abu Simbel.”

  “They were pressed into slave labor?”

  “Precisely. Health and safety precautions were rudimentary at best. The Egyptians, being a funerary people, had little regard for the amenities amongst their slaves. Work crews were driven relentlessly to meet construction deadlines. In the summer heat the toll, especially on the children and older people, was very great indeed. Jews have since recounted this suffering each year during the Passover which also celebrates their release from Egypt under Moses’ leadership. To remind subsequent generations of the bitterness of their bondage, the Haggadah which is the literature of Passover, goes into quite a bit of descriptive detail and devotes some especially vivid language to the G’tach.”

  “The G’tach is rather old, then?”

  “If my calculations are correct, some 3,200 years. The G’tach is no more, no less than the essence of maledictions, solemn
curses, anathemas wished against the Pharoahs for keeping the Israelites in bondage.”

  Trout scanned the trim heavy columns of Hebrew as the rabbi flipped the thick vellum pages. Finally he located a plate of ten engravings, each one illustrating an individual plague. He traced each scene as he enumerated: “Such things as the curse of blood, the curse of locusts, death of the first born, the curse of bats.” His finger rested on this last.

  Trout looked at the plate closely. Two dozen persons, dressed in the costumes of the day, were depicted. They’d been attacked by a swarm of black bats and now thrashed about in futile defense. Some had already fallen, and it is evident from the tears and scratches on their bodies that the others will soon drop under the animals’ claws and sharp teeth. Trout looked quizzically at the rabbi. “Just a legend, of course?”

  Ben Gabirol shook his head: “Oh, I think not!”

  “Well, what I mean is, there have been all sorts of curses down through the ages—religious, mystical, the whole foundation of human retribution.”

  The rabbi was firm. “On the contrary, Harry, there’s little doubt that the plagues did, in fact, occur, although so distant now as to seem almost a myth.”

  Trout pondered a bit. “These ten curses, did they follow any particular order?”

  “That point has been debated by Talmudic scholars through the centuries. Ben Eleazer lists no order of preference. On the other hand, the great Akiba appears to have established a tradition by describing a sequence in which the curse of boils comes first, then frogs, bats, followed by the curse of blood, of rats, then of beasts, of locusts, and hail. The final curses are a bit difficult to contemplate: death of the first born—and darkness.”

  Trout was moved by this last: “Darkness, rabbi?”

  Ben Gabirol was now fully caught up in the dream of the G’tach. His voice quivered with solemnity. “That ultimate curse was meant to bring a final onus upon the land. Dissolution, chaos, the whole nexus of the human contradiction. Night into day. And day into night. To forever end the sleep of man.”

  Trout was silent for a moment at Ben Gabirol’s words, then repeated them as if to grasp their full portent: “To forever end the sleep of man?”

  The rabbi shut the heavy book in conclusion. “Yes, Harry, the hand of death and darkness upon the land. The last and final curse of the G’tach.”

  The hand of death—darkness upon the land—fitting expletives for the rank atmosphere that swept the halls and staircases of the five-story brownstone on Maldine Square where the puppet orchestra sat stark and polished in the darkened ballroom. A vent of humor seeped and eddied past the angular rigid portraiture of the family, ranked and rankling on the velvet-papered walls. A sullen blast of wind pressed through the wooden coping on the high ceiling trim. A death gush caught, clasped, choked off candles that lit hallways wanting darkness. A bitter ozone whipped and generated the dust along the carpet seams. A sinister zephyr banged against the curtains giving them the formful billows that whispered as ghosts in a lesser setting. A shade conjured Hamlet along a dozen windowpanes. A humor gave the grim hint to closed doors. A breeze blew black night into daytime chambers. Small jets of wind puffed fabric balls, a tornado surged from the floor posts in the basement.

  Men slept by wind. A frosted face froze in wind. Intelligence wept the wind. Sails kept the wind. Mourners shuddered and crept in wind.

  The mind was wind on death. Heresy got its start on wind. Buildings came apart in wind. Plots were laid in wind, conclusions made in wind, memories lost in wind.

  The master of the letter “P”—how else could he be known—moved down the great interior staircase of the house on Maldine Square. His heels cut and clicked the air as he descended the ebony stairs; his coattails snapped the fragmented air behind. He had come from some chamber in the upper apartments and moved with uniform rapidity to reach a destination below. From his walk he appeared purposive, direct, although his features could not be seen clearly, shielded as they were by the white balustrade which snaked the length of the staircase.

  This—white columns and railings edging polished ebony stairs—dominated the cavity of the building, soaring in an unwound oval from ground floor to ceiling 70 feet above. A pale moonlight filtered through glass panes in a petal pattern. From the center of these a heavy brass chandelier dropped down three floors branching into a multiple-globed lamp which was seldom turned on. Instead the staircase was lit at night, as it was this evening, by candle-lanterns hung at intervals along its length. His shadow rose and fell as he passed each lantern, flickering into a hundred variations along the cylindrical walls.

  His footsteps continued their cadence. Now he passed along the third landing. Doors led off the hallway into its farthest reaches. A few steps and he was on the stairs again passing a pair of busts that occupied two niches along its inner wall. He gained the second landing, walking a bit slower now as he passed the massed portraiture of his family.

  The resemblance was unmistakable. The cut of his clothes bore the same unswerving sobriety, his stance was equally rigid and unyielding, his head was held with the same perception, the same acute awareness. Yet he differed from his forebears: although his dress and surroundings marked him as a figure of the past, he alone was steeped in tragic dignity, in unbounded suffering.

  He descended the final flight, his heels resounding closer now on the marble floor. He passed the large double doors to the ballroom and walked slowly, deliberately toward a room midway from the main hallway. He paused, inconsolably, as he reached the doorway, and then entered.

  The room’s interior exuded a rose glow. It appeared to be a kind of shrine. Indeed, a full portrait of a young woman, finely featured and exquisite in every detail, was attached to one wall. This portrait was different from the others in the outer hall in that the subject’s dress was contemporary and she wore her hair in the loose, fashionable style of the times. She could be his wife or his fiancee.

  He fell to his knees at a small rosewood table placed beneath her picture. Then, moaning with unbelievable sadness, he lifted his eyes toward her. He rested at her shrine for a few moments, the pink lit lanterns softening somewhat his stark grief.

  Then he rose and moved to an ornate wooden console which held an assortment of phonograph and radio equipment. Still glancing at the portrait he unfurled a long phono-jack from the console and plugged it into a receptacle in his neck. His eyes, withering in despair, darted back and forth from the portrait to the console. He moved a switch on the console.

  One cannot have been ready for what followed. The timbre of his voice and the compressed violence of his delivery were edged in a hardness out of all proportion to the grief he bore. Now he spoke for the first time, harsh, metallic, rattling and thoroughly ominous, filling the room with a terror that was at once unnatural and unwonted.

  “My love, sweet queen and noble wife, I alone remain to bring delivery of your pain, severed, my darling, too quickly, from this life. Of tears drawn and memories met, I shall hold out two hearts again in single time.”

  His voice continued to bang from the console’s speaker, drawing a chilled, detached texture from its mechanical source.

  “Nine killed you, nine shall die and be returned your loss. Nine times nine. Nine killed you. Nine shall die. Nine eternities in doom.”

  He tapered off, apparently wasted from the exertion.

  “Nine killed you, nine shall die. Darkness. The tenth. To move the earth its final sleep.” Now near the end of his strength he pulled the plug from his neck, and threw it back onto the console. Slowly, and with obvious exertion, he advanced toward the far end of the room.

  This contained dressers, side tables, glass cases and other dressing room furniture done in walnut about which was arranged his wife’s gowns, scarves, wrappers and other personal belongings. That she was a young woman when she died was attested to by the verve and style of her wardrobe: a white tennis outfit edged in blue and red stripes, a purple ballgown sewn with silver sequins, b
lack lace gloves with matching black lace shoes, a fantastic green satin coat cinched by a silver belt, a leopard muff.

  He opened the drawers slowly, wearily, drawing out a dress here, a scarf there, to admire it, folding and replacing it with great sadness afterwards. The shelving bore her cosmetics, some perfume bottles and a collection of needlepoint. A group of dolls filled another cabinet.

  He moved about her possessions stiffly. Their nearness only seemed to have submerged his grief rather than deadened it. His gloved hands touched the furniture and traced a futile pattern from piece to piece. Against all their varied colors, against the vivacity of his young dead wife, he seemed to grow even more forlorn. Finally, he moved toward the front of the room, glanced once more at his wife’s picture, and left. Tears were streaming down his face now.

  One can only approximate the perception of this ravaged, forlorn man as he lost himself again in the reaches of this strange domain on Maldine Square. A man of obvious intelligence and deep personal resource, he seems as much mechanical as made of flesh and blood. His total human landscape was polarized by an unyielding grief and equally rigid hatred. He lived, but one wondered why! He hoped— but for what? His days were an accumulation of grievous dreams of deliverance—when? His plans, intricate and of an inspired genius—were for what?

  Chapter 8

  HARRY Trout liked to stay in bed late Sunday mornings, eating peeled oranges and reading the Times, which he had delivered to his door. Even when he was at school in the midst of examinations, he wouldn’t allow the press of work to interrupt this ritual. And although he kept his grades up, it was bandied about that young Trout was a bit of a cutup—a bon vivant rather than a scholar. The reputation had stuck with him.

  This particular Sunday came at the end of a week’s worth of fine weather, and was appropriately murky. The fog settled in the night before and now it was raining, hard enough in fact to keep up a steady drumroll on the copper-shingled roof above.