For almost on the heels of the clicking, I heard a low buzzing sound. And then—clearly spoken—and in a man’s voice—but with the peculiar mechanicalness of a wax record—the words:
“You are now listening to a late-news transcription record in the Minneapolis Sun. A news transcription on the Penton Case. There is one new development in the case of the man, William Penton, not in the issue of the Sun last out. He was fined $500 thirty minutes ago in night police court, and, in the absence of the money to pay the fine, accepted a 6-month jail sentence.
“Those who read earlier issues of the Sun tonight concerning this man’s arrest will recall that Penton, an ex-newspaperman formerly with the Minneapolis Morning Bugle, was taken into custody tonight at his rooming house shortly after having visited—supposedly in the interests of securing data for a feature story—the special so-called Multi-Connection Room of the new Minneapolis Telephone Exchange, and having been left alone in it for 10 minutes. To such Minneapolisans who do not know about this room, it may be said briefly that Mr. McGowan Howell, the electrical engineer who designed and constructed the new and present Minneapolis Telephone Exchange, worked out a unique new hook-up of circuits by which, in time of emergency—such as Rood, war, hurricane—every subscriber in Minneapolis not then using his or her phone could be rung and simultaneously addressed—and without interference with nor from other subscribers’ circuits—as by a special radio announcement. The practical device for utilizing this unique hook-up was comprised by a single simple panel, in a special locked room at the top of the Telephone Exchange Building, carrying a single telephone instrument and two electrical switches. As brought out in Penton’s police court hearing tonight, Penton, angry at the Bugle because of a discharge, determined to make the Bugle the butt of a huge joke. And achieved it by getting a night superintendent in the Telephone Exchange to let him in the Multi-Connection Room, and there, on a pretext, getting the night superintendent out. During the brief time he was alone, Penton took down the single telephone, threw the switch which, it is now estimated, rang at least 500,000 Minneapolis telephone bells; and, after waiting approximately 30 full seconds so as to get as many thousands of male subscribers on their circuits as possible, threw the talking switch and then delivered an anonymous and scurrilous announcement stating that the subscriber was to be named in the Jemimah Cobb execution in London, and that already a complete feature story to that effect was lying written up on the desk of the managing editor of the Bugle. The result of this ghastly joke is that an angry crowd estimated to contain 5000 persons milled, for about an hour, around the Bugle offices tonight, while telephone service to the Bugle, caused by scores of thousands of irate telephone subscribers attempting to call the Editor, was completely swamped. Night Superintendent Herman Bowley, of the Telephone Exchange, says that never again will anybody be left alone in the Multi-Connection Room. You have now listened to a late-news transcription record in the Minneapolis Sun. For further details on this or other stories, buy the Sun from your newsdealer.
Good night!”
And, automatically, with that “Good night”—I hung up.
So—so that was the explanation of that amazing message; amazing, at least, in the matter that I—who really was destined to be named by that Negress!—should have received anonymous notice that I was going to be. And I had thought—it was some practical joker! Well, it had been a practical joke, all right—but one worked on a huger scale than any in history!
The little man at the safe was still moving his dials, and listening, moving, listening, moving, listening.
And I had not yet gotten what I had half hoped I might get.
The news of a commutation—for Jemimah Cobb.
So I tried again.
“Sun 0000.”
“Give me,” I asked the replying operator this time, “anything you might have—if you have it—on—on—on well, on anything the Home Secretary, over there in London, may have done in the matter of—”
Again I did not even get a chance to finish my sentence. But was thrown, with a loud clicking, onto a record which obviously had already started revolving for somebody else; more likely for a hundred somebody elses. And what I heard ran:
“—tening to a late-news transcription record in the Minneapolis Sun. Concerning the action tonight of Sir Stanley Gilbraith, the English Home Secretary. In releasing to the world the solution of the famous Mulkovitch Riddle. Which he had first intended to retain for his memoirs. It may be said, in brief, that the solution of this famous mystery, in which the bearded Russian, Nikolai Mulkovitch, disappeared after entering Jemimah Cobb’s dive on Exham Heath, London, and never reappeared again—either living or as a corpse—was as follows:
“46 years ago two twin girls were born in France. To a peasant couple named Brianza. One girl was christened Theodora, and one Theodosia. Theodosia, however, had a glandular defect which, as she reached her late teens, caused her to have copious facial hair; so copious and luxuriant, indeed, that she eventually wound up as a professional ‘bearded lady,’ with a small circus covering Russia and Poland. And in which country—that is, Russia—she continued thereafter to reside. Under the nondescript Polish-Russian name T. Brianzawitzi. And picking up, incidentally, the rudiments of a fair English from a professional ‘living skeleton,’ named Oliver Peebe, who was for many years with one of the travelling shows she was in, and who eventually died ‘under canvas,’ as the term is known.
“Theodora, in the meantime, at the death of the Brianzas, drifted to London. And eventually became an inmate of Jemimah Cobb’s dive.
“The dive inmate, however, wrote to her professional bearded sister regularly, in care of a certain Russian named Bluvitsky, who, it seems, bore some sort of an anomalous relationship to Theodosia which may euphemistically be said to be that of a ‘close friend.’ And who long later became commissar of emigration.
“Finally, however, Theodosia, desiring to see London—and also her sister from whom she had been separated since ’teen years—obtained a Russian passport from her good friend Bluvitsky, now a commissar of emigration. He obligingly issued it to her under the fictitious name ‘Nikolai Mulkovitch’ so that she could travel in men’s clothing, and not sacrifice the luxuriant beard and mustache which were her livelihood. He also conveniently died, after so doing, thus burying the secret of ‘Nikolai Mulkovitch’s’ identity.
“Arriving in London on the passport, Theodosia, dressed in men’s clothing and travelling as ‘Nikolai Mulkovitch,’ could find no trace of her sister at the last address given. Which was one of Jemimah Cobb’s dives which had had to take wings in a hurry! Patiently Theodosia waited in London for a further letter from Theodora, to be forwarded to her by her friend Bluvitsky. And which letter arrived in about a week, having been forwarded by Bluvitsky apparently just before he died in Russia. This letter gave, as Theodora’s new address, the house on Exham Heath. So Theodosia, still wearing men’s clothing, and heavily bearded and mustached, called that day on Exham Heath. And was admitted by Jemimah Cobb. Who, learning who Theodosia was, told her frankly that the place was a dive—and that she herself had just that noon returned from the morgue after having viewed an unidentified body described in the morning paper as having been found floating that morning in the Thames—and that the body had been that of Theodora.
“Theodosia who, it seems, was sicker of her miserable life in a circus than can be imagined—and entirely unmoral, it also seems, due to her long loose association with strange people in carnival life—and perceiving that strict feminine pulchritude was not one of the commodities dealt in by Cobb, asked Cobb desperately if she could shave off her beard and mustache and become an inmate of the place. To which Cobb greedily assented, since Theodora had, it seems, many clients!
“Immediately Theodosia shaved her face clean. And, with some help from Cobb, clipped her hair short; for Theodora—for reasons best known to h
erself, her clientele, and her black Madame, had always worn her hair short, and covered with a long golden wig. And Theodosia donned the money-making golden wig. As well as the silken garments of a Cobb dive inmate. And burned up all her discarded men’s clothing in the furnace. And the reason that not even a button was subsequently found there, was because her suit had been a cheap Russian suit with celluloid buttons!
“When the other women inmates appeared there at the dive that afternoon for work, they merely thought that Theodosia, sitting in Jemimah Cobb’s sanctum, talking to Madame Cobb—but in reality receiving voluminous instructions—was their co-worker Theodora! Then came the police raid. In which the girls were definitely identified, all of them, by one man helping in the raid—Inspector Allison—who knew them all from the last location of the resort near the West India Docks. And they were all carried off and held separate and incommunicado. Theodosia, hearing that as ‘Mulkovitch’ she was wanted for a dynamiting and a murder, kept her mouth shut. And Cobb, learning for the first time only that she had been harboring an individual supposedly mixed up in a London dynamiting and a murder, was afraid to reveal the true facts, since, under certain provisions of British Law, she could be charged as accessory after the fact, and—with her record!—get 20 years penal servitude. She deemed it far better to bluster things out—and let it appear that the American agents who claimed they had tracked ‘Mulkovitch’ to her place and then turned matters over to the London police, were only trying to get a convenient ‘out’ for having lost Mulkovitch’s trail somewhere. The final upshot of the raid was, of course, that Theodosia—now Theodora—and talking French and broken English—was sent—short-haired and wigless now, of course—to the Women’s Reformatory on Lower Thames for 6 months. Where, by means of a razor which Cobb, now out on bail, managed to have smuggled into her, she managed to keep her face clean of bristle. And was, at the end of her sentence, deported to France. Where—so the English Home Secretary says Cobb told him—she died a couple of months later. Thus—in brief—the absolutely insolvable disappearance, 5 years ago in London, of the Russian ‘Nikolai Mulkovitch.’ You have now listened to a late-news transcription record in the Minneapolis Sun. For further details on this or other stories, buy the Sun from your—”
I hung up.
So—so that was the Mulkovitch Riddle? Not the disappearance of a man at all—but the disappearance of a beard and a mustache—and a suit with celluloid buttons! And it had created an enigma that had made policemen wrack their brains. And it had—
But still I had not yet gotten what I had started out to get.
The possible news—of a barely possible commutation for Jemimah Cobb.
The little man across the room from me was still working the dials of the safe, listening, working, listening.
And again I dialed the telephone in front of me for Sun 0000. And this time specifically asked:
“Give me—if you have anything at all—whatever you have—on—on Jemimah Cobb, London.”
And again the clicking, and again my being thrown squarely onto the revolving record. And—
I stiffened up in my chair.
Jemimah Cobb had been executed! And had spoken her piece—on the gallows!
CHAPTER XXVIII
The Expert and the Burglar-Proof Safe
For the wax record, already running, was proclaiming, in clearly spoken words:
“—was executed tonight at London—and delivered her final revelation, exactly as she had threatened!—at 11 p.m. Minneapolis time. Which was 5 a.m. London time. Her execution was in expiation of the atrocious murder, by strangulation, of her Chinese lover, to obtain 3000 pounds sterling which he had on his person. The reason for the sudden last-minute advancement of her execution hour by the Governor-General of the Prison, who always has the option of changing the hour of an execution, but not the calendar date thereof, was that, in his opinion, further delay would only mean that Jemimah Cobb would not even know she was being executed—and would thus defeat the very fundamental purposes of British justice. For Cobb, it seems, was undergoing a definite mental transition since 6 o’clock last evening. And already, indeed, by the time she ascended the gallows, had so lost her mental faculties that she apparently believed the gallows was a special reviewing stand, built for her alone, and that the assembled witnesses were the House of Lords. She indicated plainly by her words that she believed the House of Lords had visited her, en masse, to hear certain information she was to render, and to conduct her triumphantly away.
“As the location of the famous wedding certificate in the case, she stated—in a clear calm voice—that it lay, face uppermost, for all the world to read, in Room 48, in a house on the southeast corner of Bloomsbury Street and Montague Place, London. Such journalists as, after the execution, rushed to this spot, found only one ‘house’—and one ‘corner’—and that house—the British Museum! And only then did several of the journalists recall that in Case No. 48—or Room 48, as Jemimah Cobb had put it—lay, face uppermost, no less than the world-famous Rosetta Stone! Jemimah Cobb also gave, just before the trap descended, the name of the American she claimed to have once married her; but unfortunately for her revelation, she named a man known never to have been in London.
“In fact, obviously completely unhinged, the name she gave was that of the President of the United States. You have now listen—”
I hung up.
Jemimah Cobb was gone! And had failed to name me! Or, even, to name the whereabouts of that damned certificate. And all because her black African brain couldn’t take a “civilized” punishment! Because—she had cracked. Because she had made a complete crack-up!
Coming so suddenly as it had, it seemed almost too impossible to believe. It seemed, moreover, like a dream. For the little man at the safe was still working methodically away at his dials. Just as he had been when I had first started raising that phone.
But either because I had been dumfounded at the news—or else because two or more persons had been closeted in this room all evening, I felt warm—overheated. And the remembrance of the sweet smell of that outside air, when I’d tossed Mr. Skull out on the lawn, came back to me—and I determined, on the spot, that we might as well have more—of the same!
And so I rose, and, hand in pocket, as though on the handle of that imaginary gun, strode over to the big window, and flung it all the way up—to give some really fresh oxygen to this completely closed house.
Which accomplished, I turned around to see how my expert was coming along with his task.
And—by God!—
While my back had been turned—in that short interval of time necessary to fling up the big window—he had quietly succeeded in swinging open the great door of the safe, and had extracted therefrom a huge blue-steel revolver which, in less than a second, he had raised—pointed in my direction—and fired—with a thundering report great enough to wake twenty neighborhoods, if neighborhoods there had been there on Hobury Heights.
I dropped flat to the floor on my stomach—and lay still as a log.
Hurt not a bit! I had no way of knowing whether he’d missed me by a mile—pierced my clothing—or cut a furrow through my hair. Though a peculiar tingling sensation in my scalp made me believe that his bullet had slithered through my scalp hair like a pig through underbrush. And while I lay there, prone, never moving, not even breathing, he stood stock-still. For perhaps a quarter of a minute. At least—not a sound came from where he was. During which time the fibers in the rug looked, to my downward-facing eyes, as big as tree trunks. Then I heard him coming toward me with apparently giant strides—except that, instead of coming all the way to me, he cleared the room between the safe and the table, rounded the table, and plumped down into the swivel chair with his back, therefore, to me.
And commenced swiftly dialing the telephone.
Cautiously, I raised my head. Silently, I regained my knees and fe
et. I tiptoed backward a step or two to the window, where I stood, watching the little man in the swivel chair.
Almost on what must have been his last twirl of the phone dial, he got his connection. And he spoke rapidly into the instrument, unrestrainedly, as a man speaks who believes that he is entirely alone.
“Put Lefty on the wi—” he began. “Oh, Lefty? Good! Say, Lefty—bring your black sedan—with all its curtains drawed—to—yes, you know where. And fetch that old first-aid kit o’ yours—for good measure. Yes. I’ve either wounded or killed a guy. Killed him, though, I’m abs’lutely cert. An’ if he’s dead—no, no, I don’t know who he is. Nor ain’t even got the slightest clue. All I know on him is that he called up a dame in St. P. that he was hitched to onct—an’ if you coulda lamped the glad, happy look on his puss when she told him she was hitched again, and had a brat, you’d a been knocked f’r—f’r a goal. A fac’! No—no—he never onct let her name slip out—jus’ called her by some private marr’age name—exac’ly as she did him—names d’rived, it’s plain as hell, outa what she an’ him dressed as—when they first met at some masquerade. Yeah—her in one o’ them feathered sparrow suits like you see now an’ then at Minski’s Hall on a Sattiday night; and him—as it was goddamned easy to figger out—in a tin crown—and cotton ermine! Oh it was plain as a—b—c! But that ain’t neither here nor there, Lefty, see? For—no, no, no, she was his wiff, I tell you—rather, ex-wiff—because he stuck three fingers in his shirt gap the very minute he started gassin’ with her. Oh, hell—I’ll explain it when you get here. It’s—it’s somethin’ to do with somethin’ called subconscientiousness. Now get here quick, will you? For if he’s dead—as I’m abs’lutely goddamn cert he is all right—I want you to help me yank his carcass quietly out o’ the joint here before anybody blows back to it—an’ dump him on th’ other side of th’ Wisconsin line. I—Christ no, Lefty!—it wasn’t no scrap. I told you I didn’t even know him. Just got into town tonight—but left my keys back there in—you know?—in V—yes. Found the house all deserted—servants gone—so I come up to th’ liberry window by a ladder—and found this son-of-a-bitch here, and—no, no, no, no, Lefty, this ain’t Spike talking—don’t you know your Boss yet?—yes—yes—King talking—sure—yes, Mort King himself. And—”
The Man with the Magic Eardrums Page 24
