"And you're only nine high!"
"The number nine, according to the Pythagoreans, is sacred, and attains the summits of philosophy."
"Very good. I certainly want to sit in to the game."
They went down to Burns' house, and found him alone. He greeted the Commissioner with just the proper feeling. Iff asked for a special interview 'on important business', and came straight to the point.
"I want to say my say," he began, "before my friend here says his. I have only one remark to make, which is this: The wages of sin is death."
Burns smiled, and lighted a cigar. This fanatic amused him. But he restrained an early impulse to answer anything.
"Whatsoever a man soweth," went on the mystic, "that shall he also reap. He that soweth to the flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption. Doctor Tardie tells me..."
Simon Iff broke off as he saw that Burns had let his cigar go out. He waited for him to relight it. The Commissioner noticed how great an effort it cost him.
Iff did not have to lie; he switched off from an indicative to an apodeictic proposition. "A man of your nervous tension is particularly liable to end with locomotor ataxia, general paralysis of the insane, or softening of the brain."
Burns took no second chance with his cigar, he puffed vigorously.
"It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. You indulge in secret your desire toward an inferior race, as you deem it - and you end by finding yourself in the power of your own cook."
Burns smoked more easily. A slight smile touched his lips. But Simon Iff was watching his eyes; there was no smile in them.
"He that, being often reproved, hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy."
Simon Iff shut his mouth like the snapping of a trap.
Burns, unmoved, smoked his cigar steadily to the end. Then he crushed the fire of the butt upon a silver ashtray. Then he went to the door of the strongroom and opened it. From a drawer he took a heavy revolver, and deliberately blew away the top of his skull.
The Commissioner was on his feet, gasping. A second glance assured him that the man was dead. He turned upon Iff with a mixture of awe and horror.
The mystic, in his turn, had drawn a long black cigar from his case, and was lighting it with a hand that did not tremble in the least.
"My dear man!" was all the Commissioner could say.
"You want to know, of course? Come here!"
The magician stepped across the body, and opened one of the drawers in the strongroom at random. It was full of photographs. "Pah!" cried Teake in disgust. "Observe!" said Simon, returning to his easy chair. "When I came here I had no idea at all that the death of Mrs. Burns was anything beyond the accident it appeared. But the moment Claudine stepped into the room I understood from her manner that she had been bullied secretly and subtly until she was afraid to express herself in the simplest matter without thought, earnest thought, as to whether it might not get her into trouble. Yet a mask was always put upon the truth; she and her mother were always obliged to exhibit a 'happy home', an 'ideal American family life'. I began to understand the hard brutality of the man from that as well as from his success in business. I know also that he had expressed his own vices in the naming of his daughter after an immoral woman. Of course he would not have dared to use any name which the general public would have connected with lasciviousness, such as Cleopatra. He chose a name to which not one American in a million would attach any significance whatever. Returning to the mother, then what must her life have been with such a man? I began to suspect suicide rather than accident. So I asked the family doctor whence the Mercury had come. He could not tell me. 'Claudine' gave me a clue.
"Before I could go further, lunch arrived. I found this hard brutal cynical sensual man, annoyed at his cook's blunders, making excuses for her. Fear, I thought! What else could explain the situation? So I contrived to see the cook, and found an ambitious and intriguing woman, a woman of almost a male quality of lust, grasping at power like Browning's John the Pannonian. Then I perceived what influence might have forced him, with the Mercury ready to his hand, to murder. Oh, a safe murder! Who would suspect him of having such a drug? Who would guess, when he had been so careful as to go to Philadelphia to consult a physician under an assumed name? Even were the Mercury traced to him, still an accident! 'Poor woman, she took my tablets in mistake for hers!'"
"Yes,yes!" said the Commissioner, "I follow. I understood your train of reason before we came here. But how in God's name" - he crossed himself - "did you come to suppose that the hardest-headed man in America would fall for all that stuff from the Bible? Man, it isn't common sense!"
Simple Simon smiled with wide-open, childish eyes. "But, my dear Commissioner, think of his name! Phineas Calvin Zebedee! Don't you know who Phineas was? He 'stood for the Lord' when all Israel 'went an-whoring after Moab' or something. And Zebedee, the father of James and John, the 'Sons of Thunder.' There's your religious atmosphere! And Calvin! Why, the boy sucked in Calvin with his mother's milk. He was born and bred to that one great idea of inexorable fate. Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small, and all that, don't you know? On the top of that, too, what do we know of the father who named him? A narrow bigot, who repressed his son's normal instincts, and named him after a tyrant like himself, but with a passionate revolt against enforced chastity seeping at the very base of his nervous sytem! Well, the lust side of him was the art side too; he naturally dramatized the fate that his other side assured him must one day fall upon him, and he saw that fate in my person when I quietly reminded him of what penalties he had incurred."
The commissioner sat awhile in silence. Suddenly he shook himself like a dog. "I suppose I'd better get after that cook," he said, mechanically.
"Spare yourself the pains and the humiliation," said Simon. "He will have left her every penny - you don't have one chance in a million."
"True; but can't we do something for Claudine?"
"We can get back to New York, and dine at the Club. Claudine will be either a courtesan or a nun, and we can't help in either case."
"We can get back to new York; in fact I must; but somehow I don't feel like dinner."
And so it came about that Simon Iff dined that night with Wimble; but the only explanation that he would give was most unsatisfactory.
"It's my idiotic vanity, child!" he said, with his eighth creme de cacao; "I said to you jokingly that a man with a name like that was bound to have poisoned his wife, and so of course I had to prove it. I think I will have another Corona Corona."
Wimble, who always pretended to be excessively mean, pretended to writhe; but the waiter brought the cigar.
A Sense of Incongruity
I
"This is the sort of puzzle we get every day," said Commissioner Teake to Simon Iff. The Head of the New York Police was doing the honours of the organization to the distinguished stranger. "Here's a shabby individual - speaks Hungarian, not a word of anything else - can't give any account of himself. Has lost his memory absolute."
"Oh!" said Simon Iff. "And where did you pick him up?"
"In a raid last night on a dive on Tenth Avenue. Possibly the shock of arrest - there was a little shooting practice, too - has destroyed his memory. He's a pretty tough guy, as you see; but I feel - well, traces of intelligence and refinement. We're holding him for observation, and to try to get in touch with some relatives."
They passed on. In the next room Simon Iff stopped the Commissioner. He put a hand on his shoulder, and said slowly: "If you get a puzzle of that sort every day, you must be a fairly busy man."
Teake was struck by the extreme significance of the mystic's tone. "Some funny business, eh?"
"Well," said Simon, "I perceive a certain Incongruity. Will you do me the favour to answer me just one question? What well-known man of high position in a foreign government did you find in that - dive, I think you called it?"
Teake was taken entirely aback. H
is eyes blazed. "What do you know?" he cried! "Is this a sample of this black magic of yours?"
"So the cap fits?"
"Why, Captain Nikko, naval attaché to the Cerisien Embassy, was there."
"In a dive on Tenth Avenue. Strike you as strange?"
"Not very. He was showing the sights of this little old burg to a compatriot, a Dr. Nagasaki, who has just come over from Cerisia. But how did you know?"
"I didn't know. I was only trying to find a reason for the presence of a member of one of the great imperial families of Europe. It might have been just curiosity or just vice, but the disguise was so very thorough."
"Say!"
"Didn't you notice his hands? Of course you did. But you didn't go on one step, as I did. Under that ten days' beard was a lip that only grows on one family face on the planet."
"And he's lost his memory?"
"If he remembers nothing else, he remembers me! I can't place him; but he knew me in a second."
"This is the most extraordinary dope!"
"So much so that I want you to tell the sergeant not to let him go; charge him straitly 'by his affection for the Archangel Michael', I think it is. Don't let him wash, or monkey with his clothes, or destroy anything. And come over with me to the Secret Service, and we'll talk."
"Well, there is a little thunder in the air, now you mention it, about the attitude of Cerisia."
"Especially in connexion with that country - not Hungary - where that - tough guy, I think you said - has his nails manicured every morning by a Duchess!"
"Aren't we taking a chance if we put any indignity on him? I've my job to think of. I don't want to catch a Tartar."
"My friend, you've caught a Tartar. And your one best bet is not to let go."
Teake gave some rather elaborate orders, and drove with Iff directly to the Headquarters of the Secret Service.
Colonel Blagden listened in silence to Iff's story. "It wouldn't do for England any more than it would for you," the magician concluded. "So I came round."
"Nikko - Nagasaki - man with a Brzoloff lip - Tenth Avenue. Hum. Washington. Excuse me." Blagden took the telephone. Ten minutes later his face was as white as his collar. "I'm coming round," he said, and called for his coat and hat.
Teake took the sergeant into a private room, but Blagden did the questioning.
"Pockets?" he snapped.
"Two hundred and three dollars, sir, four fifties and three ones; two quarters, a dime, six nickles and three pennies. An old envelope, addressed to Stefan Boluski, Hotel Tart, Cincinnati. Postmark, Boston, December twelve, noon. Hotel has no record of any such name. Pencilled accounts, in Hungarian, scribbled on back of envelope. Nothing else but a cheap pocket-knife."
"Linings?"
"Not a thing, sir."
"Wait outside." Blagden turned to Simon Iff. "I feel we owe you a great deal; I should like to increase the debt. What do you make of it?"
"Are those accounts written in indelible pencil?"
Blagden called the sergeant, and sent him for the envelope.
"No," said he, "faint pencillings, almost rubbed out."
"May I see?" Blagden passed it over. "Done with a devilish hard pencil, about 8H, at a guess. I could rub the marks clean, and still read by the impression. He valued those accounts. An 8H pencil on a prince or a tramp strikes me as an Incongruity. Let's see. Room 25 = car 7. Where does one pay 7 cents for a carfare?"
"Nowhere - yet."
"Aha! Cigar 11. There's another funny figure. Those aren't accounts; it's the key to a cipher."
Blagden grunted angrily. "Mr. Iff," he said, "I must take you into the confidence of the Government of the United States. We have been expecting something serious in this direction for a month or more. I can't say exactly what, or how serious. But I think our man's Prince Theodor Brzoloff, who is supposed to be big game hunting in Central Asia, well out of touch with telegraphs."
"Yes, that's the man. I remember him perfectly now. I met him in the rest-house at Burzil, on the Gilgit road, ten years ago. A great traveller and a fine shot."
"A damned mischief-maker," growled Blagden. "Now there's only one reason why he should be here - to bring some kind of a paper to Nikko, a secret treaty of sorts. I see now why he's shamming amnesia. If by some impossible chance - just what's happened - he were recognized, he might be traced to his rooms, and the paper discovered."
"He's not going to take a second chance of being seen with Nikko if he can help it. He had that paper on him at the dive."
"What sort of a paper?"
"It would be a fairly long document, I imagine. Five thousand words or so, perhaps."
"It's on him. It must be on him. Suppose we have a look at those clothes ourselves?"
Blagden recalled the sergeant.
"Bring that Hungarian's clothes here. Tell him it's the regulation to have them disinfected."
The clothes arrived. Blagden began to turn them over.
"Please!" interjected Simon Iff. "The police have done all that can be done by touching them. Let us content ourselves with looking at them."
Blagden put his hands in his pockets with a smile. "Well, what do we see?"
"I see an Incongruity."
"Good. Reminds one of the personal disguise. Same trick."
"These clothes are very old, very worn, very ragged in places. They were orginally cheap but respectable. Nice dark blue. Where's the princely touch?"
'Simple Simon' tapped the lining of the coat. "The lining's new. Very high quality linen. Dark blue. Suggest litmus to me. Writing on litmus would be quite invisible. Suppose we brush it over with acid?"
"And read it in red?"
"In red - very likely." Simon Iff did not care to conceal his view of the menace implied by such extraordinary precautions.
Teake summoned an expert, who began to brush the blue lining with a pencil of soft camel's hair dipped in vinegar.
A faint rust red appeared upon the indigo of the linen. Blagden bent over.
"Good God! It's the Imperial holograph. His majesty's rescript! They've photo-lithographed the original and printed it in litmus. What perfectly beautiful work!"
Iff seemed lost in thought. "It's not in cipher, then?"
"Perfectly plain French, to begin, at least. It wouldn't be a cipher. They needed the holograph. This is an Authority; it has to be legible as his Majesty's own handwriting."
Iff lapsed.
"This needs careful restoration," said the expert. "May I take it for half an hour?"
"Right," agreed Blagden. "Teake, could we have something to eat here? It may be my last chance for some time."
The Commissioner ordered a meal.
"I don't know how to thank you," said Blagden to Simon Iff, raising his cocktail, "for your miraculous solution of this mystery. My God! to think of getting on to a thing this size from - from - from literally nothing."
"You irritate me," replied Simon, in a burst of furious ill-temper, "you humiliate me. You rub it in. Oh go on! It will do me good. It will cure me of the sin of pride. Also," he added in a more reflective tone, "perhaps it may buck me up."
"I don't get you," returned Blagden, rather annoyed.
"Why, don't you see, it's all come out WRONG."
The last word was a shout. "It's too easy. There's an Incongruity - the worst kind of all the kinds - an apparent simplicity in what one knows to be most highly complex. Here, do you play chess?"
Blagden admitted it: Teake was silent.
"Well, take a chess problem by a good composer. I see - at a glance - what looks like a solution. Carefully concealed key - elegant line of play - neat mating position. But what's that Rook doing in the corner? It is not essential to our solution. Then why did the composer put it on the board? It's bad economy, and a good composer doesn't do that. Our supposed solution must be a mere 'try' - a false alarm."
"Yes," said Blagden, curiously disturbed. "Meaning what?"
"What's Nagasaki doing? He doesn't come into it at all
. A man of his importance doesn't come over here to be a makeweight. Then, here's a key to a cipher which turns out not to be a cipher at all."
"I don't follow. There are plenty of explanations. An imperial rescript sent in this extraordinary form outweighs all the facts. The sun blots out the stars."
"Yes, but some of those stars are bigger than the sun."
The door opened, and the expert came back.
In his hands was the lining of the tough guy's jacket, pinned neatly to a board. The red writing showed out brilliantly. But the amazement was his face. It was one web of twinkling wrinkles; decorum was hard put to it to keep him from relapsing into the fits of laughter into which the perusal of the document had thrown him. "I'm afraid it's a hoax, sir," was all he could trust himself to say.
"What do you mean?" snapped Blagden, furious.
"It's a joke, sir. This is the production of a lunatic. I should say, sir, it's some stunt for advertising a sensational story."
His amusement overcame him for a moment; then he repressed himself with infinite embarrassment. Blagden took the board. He read with dropped jaw and eyes that seemed as if they would burst from their sockets.
The rescript began by expressing the Imperial sympathy for "the catastrophe which has recently overwhelmed the Government of the United States." It went on to say that in view of the state of anarchy prevailing in consequence of this catastrophe, of the collapse of the financial system of the country, of the revolt of the negroes in the South, and of certain lawless and disorderly elements of the population describing themselves as socialists, anarchists, working men's reform associations, and what not, his Majesty and his Government "would view without alarm any steps which might be advisably taken by the Dewan of Cerisia to restore the blessings of peace and order to the people of the United States of America."
"This," said Blagden, "is an authorization to Cerisia to invade this country - which is absurd - on the grounds of various events which haven't happened, and are not in the least likely."
The Complete Simon Iff Page 16
