In the House of Secret Enemies

by George C. Chesbro

  I said I did. Fred Haley and I had shared a few cups of coffee together.

  “Mr. Haley swears to me that he’s seen Dr. Kee before, in Korea. As you probably know, Mr. Haley was a POW. He tells me that Dr. Kee—who was using a different name then—was an enemy interrogator, in charge of the brainwashing program to which all of the POWs were subjected. He had a reputation for brutality, psychological and physical.”

  I mulled that over in my mind. Fred Haley was not a man given to wild accusations. At least he was no more paranoid than anybody else who has to live and/or work in New York.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time a former enemy had come to work in the United States,” I said. “Often it works to our benefit, as in the case of Von Braun. He changed his name to keep people from rattling the skeletons in his closet. It’s possible everything’s on the up-and-up.”

  “Yes, it’s possible. But since the good name of the university is involved, don’t you feel it’s worth some investigation?”

  I said I thought it was. We discussed the mundane subject of fees and I told him I’d look into it.

  I checked into my university office, did some paperwork, then locked up and headed across the campus toward Marten Hall, an older building which houses the Psychology Department.

  It soon became apparent that one doesn’t just walk in and strike up a conversation with a Nobel Prize winner; Smathers’ security system would have shamed the nearest missile-tracking base. His first line of defense was his secretary, a 250-pound, hawk-faced woman who had somehow escaped the last pro football draft. The nameplate on her desk said Mrs. Pfatt. It really did.

  She stopped torturing her typewriter long enough for me to introduce myself as one of Smathers’ university colleagues, a criminologist who wanted to consult with Dr. Smathers on a question of criminal psychology, if you please.

  I was told Dr. Smathers had no time for consultations. The typewriter groaned and clacked.

  “In that case, perhaps I could speak with Dr. Kee.”

  I was told Dr. Kee had no time for consultations.

  I left Mrs. Pfatt and walked down a long corridor lined on both sides with classrooms. A few undergraduate classes were in session, filled with sleepy-looking freshmen. Everything looked distressingly in order. Most of the students in the building recognized me and waved. I smiled and waved back.

  Marten Hall has four floors, and I assumed Smathers had his private offices and research labs on the top one. I worked my way up the floors as casually as possible. The third floor was mostly offices and laboratories sparsely populated on a Saturday morning with a few graduate researchers. I headed toward the stairway at the end of the corridor, stopped and stared. Somebody had installed a heavy steel door across the entrance to the stairs. NO ADMITTANCE—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY was stenciled in red paint across the door.

  Less money should have been spent on material and more on the lock; I got out my set of skeleton keys and hit on the third try. I pushed the door open. A narrow flight of stairs snaked up and twisted to the left, out of sight. I was beginning to understand where much of the first year’s $100,000 had gone; the inside of the door, as well as the walls and ceiling of the staircase, had been soundproofed. It seemed a curious expense for a Psychology Department; mental processes just don’t make that much noise.

  I climbed the stairs and found myself at the end of a long corridor, expensively refinished with glassed-in offices on one side and closed doors on the other. I pushed one of the doors and it swung open. I stepped in, closed the door behind me and turned on the lights.

  It was a laboratory, large, heavily soundproofed. There was an array of monitoring machines, computers and other sophisticated equipment lined up against the walls. All had wires leading to a large, water-filled tank in one corner of the lab. The tank looked like an aquarium designed to hold a baby whale. It was at least ten feet long, three feet wide and four feet deep. Electrode nodes were built into the glass walls of the tank, along with black rubber straps that now floated on the surface.

  I poked around the machines for a while, but couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to do. I turned off the lights, went out of the lab and walked quietly down the corridor, glancing in the other rooms with the closed doors. They were all labs, similar to the one in which I had been. The offices on my left were all empty—except for the last one.

  The Chinese caught me out of the corner of his eye. He was the original Captain Flash, out of his chair and standing in front of me in a lot less time than it would have taken Superman to find a phone booth. I should have listened to Barnum’s sermonette on first impressions; the man in front of me looked like a refugee from some tong war. Somebody had tried to use his head as a whetstone; the whole right side of his face was a sheet of white, rippled scar tissue. The right eye was stitched shut, unseeing, but the other eye was perfectly good, and it was obvious that he had all the moves. He was crouched now, perfectly balanced on the balls of his feet, his calloused hands rigid and extended in front of him like knife blades.

  I smiled and gave him a cheery good morning. He must have taken it as a Chinese insult, or maybe he just didn’t like dwarfs. He grabbed my right shoulder and threw me over his hip. I bounced off the wall and fell to the floor, where I stayed, eyes half-closed, watching him. He came forward in the same crouch, his hands in front of him. This guy could kill.

  I waited until he was just above me, then snapped my left leg out, catching him on the side of the knee with the instep of my shoe. The joint snapped. His eyes flecked with pain and he toppled backward. He didn’t stay down for long. Somehow he managed to get up on his one good leg and, dragging the smashed one behind him, he came toward me.

  The karate had surprised him, but that was finished. I had a black belt, but so, obviously, did he. This time he meant to kill.

  His arm darted out like a snake’s tongue, the deadly knuckle of his middle finger aiming for my forehead. An ear-splitting scream deafened me as I ducked. The missile that was his hand went over my head and smashed into the wall behind me. I came up with my head into his solar plexus. He grunted as he rose into the air, then screamed when he came down on the bad leg. He crumpled over on his side.

  The man was finished, staring up at me with hatred and unspeakable pain forming a second skin over his eye. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. I went back down the stairs and headed for my office.

  It didn’t take Smathers long to get there. He burst through the office door, long brown hair flowing behind him, his face the color of chalk. He barely managed to bring himself to a halt in front of my desk. He stood there, trembling with rage, literally speechless. A tall, thin man with pale, exhausted eyes, he leaned on the desk and finally managed to speak.

  “What were you doing in my private laboratories?”

  “I got lost looking for the men’s room.”

  Smathers’ rage was probably more justified than my sarcasm, but he looked fairly ridiculous. His tongue worked its way back and forth across his lips. “You, sir, are a liar!”

  “Okay, Dr. Smathers,” I said testily. “The reason is quite simple. I was looking for you or Dr. Kee. I wanted to consult on a professional matter.”

  “My secretary told you that neither Dr. Kee nor I have time for such matters.”

  “I don’t like doing business through other people’s secretaries.”

  “The door to the laboratories was locked!”

  “Not when I got there, it wasn’t,” I lied. “Talk to your keeper of the keys; the door was open when I walked by, so I just went up. The next thing I knew I was face to face with Fu Manchu.”

  “Do you realize that that man may never walk properly again?”

  “He was trying to kill me. If you or your associates want to press charges, go ahead. We’ll take it up with the president. Barnum might like to find out what’s so important to you that you feel the need to keep it locked behind two inches of steel.”

  That backed him up. He took his h
ands off the top of my desk and straightened up, making a conscious effort to control himself. “I don’t think there’s any need for that,” he said. “We’re both professionals. I have no desire to get you into trouble and, quite frankly, I can’t spare the time from my work that bringing charges against you would entail.”

  “Just what would that work be?” I asked casually.

  “Surely you can appreciate the fact that I don’t care to discuss my private affairs with you.”

  “Sorry, I was just making conversation. I couldn’t help but be curious as to what kind of research requires a human watchdog like the one that came after me.”

  Smathers made a nervous gesture with his hand. “Quite frankly, Dr. Kee and I are involved in research into some of the more bizarre human mental aberrations. On occasion, we have potentially dangerous people on that floor. Tse Tsu thought you might have been one of them. He overreacted in simply doing his job.”

  “What are those water tanks for?”

  Gates clanged shut behind Smathers’ eyes. “You’ve been spying!”

  “Not at all. I just happened to be looking around for you and noticed the tanks. Naturally, I was curious.”

  “You will not come up there again, Dr. Frederickson.”

  “Interesting man, this colleague of yours. Did you know that Dr. Kee used to be an officer in the Peoples’ Liberation Army in North Korea? I understand he was a brainwashing specialist.”

  Smathers flushed. “That’s slanderous. Who told you this?”

  “It’s just a rumor. Haven’t you heard it?”

  “I wouldn’t pay any attention to such a story.”

  “Why not? The war’s over.”

  Smathers was either tired of talking or didn’t like the turn the conversation had taken. He gave me a long, hard stare. “Please don’t interfere in my affairs anymore, Dr. Frederickson.”

  I wanted to talk some more, but Smathers had already turned and was walking out of my office. He slammed the door behind him. I picked up the phone and dialed Barnum’s office. After running a gauntlet of secretaries, I finally got to hear the Big Man himself.

  “This is Frederickson,” I said. I considered telling him about the incident—and the laboratories—in Marten Hall, then decided against it. “I have a nagging feeling that you left out parts of the story.”

  “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.” Barnum’s voice was arch, restrained. I’d hurt his dignity.

  “What did Smathers win his Nobel Prize for?”

  “He did pioneering work in sensory deprivation. He’s the top authority in his field.”

  “Sensory deprivation; that’s artificially taking away all a man’s senses—sight, sound, smell, touch, taste?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “To what end?”

  “No end. That’s what the experimentation was all about: to determine the effects. NASA was interested in it for a while because of its possible relation to interplanetary space travel, but they gave it up when it became apparent that it was too dangerous for the volunteers involved.”

  I remembered Smathers’ comment about dangerous people in his laboratories. I’d assumed he’d been making excuses for his Chinese gorilla. Now I wondered; but I wasn’t ready to accuse him of anything, at least not yet.

  “Where did he come from?”

  “Platte Institute. Near Boston.”

  “I know where it is. How did he come here? Platte takes good care of its prize winners. It’s hard for me to believe they wouldn’t have matched any offer you made.”

  I took the long silence at the other end of the line as an answer of sorts, a justification for the nagging itch at the back of my mind.

  “There’s some question about it, isn’t there?” I pressed.

  “There’s no question that Dr. Smathers is a Nobel Prize winner,” Barnum said. He sounded irritated. “They’re not exactly a dime a dozen, you know.”

  “So you don’t ask questions when one wants to leave one place and come to another?”

  “No,” Barnum said after a long pause. “But he came with the highest recommendations.”

  “I’m sure he did. Now, what you want to know is how you came to get a Nobel Prize winner at what amounts to bargain basement prices.”

  Again, a long pause, then: “Have you found out anything?”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  Barnum was, after all, my client, and I wasn’t quite sure why I’d held back on him. Perhaps it was because Smathers was a colleague, and scientists—especially brilliant ones—take enough nonsense from administrators as it is. I had been nosing around some very expensive equipment in an area that had clearly been off-limits to me. I wanted to do some more digging before I started telling tales.

  I went to the Liberal Arts building and looked around for Fred Haley. I wanted some more information on the other, nonscholarly side of Dr. Kee. It would have to wait; Haley was away for the weekend.

  The walk wasn’t entirely wasted, as I managed to latch onto Jim Larkin, a former student of mine who was now a graduate fellow in experimental psychology. He accepted my offer of a cup of coffee and we went downstairs to the Student Union. I gradually steered the conversation around to Dr. Vincent Smathers.

  “Strange man,” Jim said. Coming from him, it was hard to tell whether this was a complaint or a compliment. Probably it was neither. Jim was a young man with an almost fanatic devotion to the notion of live and let live. “All the graduate fellows were assured before he came here that we’d have access to him, that he wouldn’t be just a high-priced name for the university to print in its alumni newsletter. However …”

  “I take it that it didn’t work out that way?”

  “Smathers showed up at exactly one of our graduate seminars, and that was it.”

  “Interesting. What do you suppose he does with his time?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” Jim said. A braless co-ed, who shouldn’t have been, had entered the cafeteria and was bobbing along the tables. I made a stab at getting Jim’s attention back.

  “What happens to a man when he undergoes sensory deprivation?”

  Jim turned back to me. “That’s Dr. Smathers’ field.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, simply put, he goes out of his mind. To be more precise, his mind goes out of him. You take away all a man’s sensory landmarks and he becomes like a baby, with no past, present, or future, at least while he’s undergoing the deprivation. He becomes very suggestible.”

  “You mean he’s brainwashed?”

  Jim made a face. “That’s an old-fashioned term.”

  “Uh-huh. Is it like brainwashing?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “How do you go about this sensory deprivation?”

  “The first thing you need is a controlled medium in which to support the man’s body.”

  “Like water?”

  “Yeah, water’s good. What are you getting at, Dr. Frederickson?”

  “Just curious,” I said with a straight face. “What do you think of Smathers’ Chinese helpers?”

  Jim shrugged noncommittally. “I’ll tell you this,” he said after some thought, “I think there’s some strange business going on in that department.”

  “What kind of strange business?”

  “You heard about that guy who was shot on campus? The old Bowery bum?”

  I said I had.

  “I saw him in Marten Hall one day. He was walking with one of Dr. Smathers’ assistants, one of those Chinese guys.”

  Garth, as usual, was chin-deep in paperwork. My brother, all six-feet-plus of him, was sitting behind a desk which might have fit me, merrily clacking away at a typewriter, vintage nineteenth century. His face was grim; his face was always grim when he was doing paperwork. He didn’t bother looking up.

  “Look what the ants dragged in. What’s happening, Mongo?”

  “I just wanted to drop in and say hello to my brother.”

 
“You’re here to pump information,” Garth said evenly. He hit the wrong key and swore.

  “There was an old man killed on the university campus a few weeks back. Shot.”

  Garth frowned. “I don’t recall it.”

  “You probably had fifty murders the same day. In any case, I’d like a look at the file.”

  “Why?”

  “C’mon, Garth. I’m on a fishing expedition.”

  Garth leaned back in his chair and stared at me. His eyes were hard. “You’re beginning to take our relationship for granted, Mongo. This is a police station, a public agency, and you’re a private citizen. You can’t just walk in here and ask to look at a confidential file.” He paused. Something moved behind his eyes. “You got a lead on this thing?”

  “I’m groping around in the dark, Garth. Maybe yes, maybe no. I don’t want to talk about it, not yet. And I happen to know that that precious file is buried somewhere. The New York Police Department doesn’t have time to investigate the death of some Bowery bum. Sure, you did an autopsy because it’s required by law in a murder case, but it’s never going to be investigated because you just don’t have the manpower. It’s not going to hurt to let me look at the file.”

  Garth’s eyes flashed and the bald spot on top of his head reddened. “You’ve got a lot of lip today, brother.”

  “It’s the truth, and you know it. Besides, you owe me a couple. Let me see the file, Garth.”

  Garth hesitated a moment, then got up and disappeared into another room. He returned a few moments later with the file. I thanked him, but Garth said nothing. He went back to his typing and I went over to a corner with the file.

  The dead man’s name was Bayard T. Manning, and his only known address had been a flophouse on the Bowery. Everything was covered in three short paragraphs. The most interesting part was the results of the autopsy, covered in the last paragraph. Manning had been a dedicated alcoholic; cirrhosis of the liver had set in years before, and his brain had been just about pickled. The curious thing was that he’d been off the juice for at least a month, according to the pathologist’s report. Not a drop. Bone dry. The texture of his skin indicated that he’d spent a great deal of time in water just before his death. He’d been holding a transistor tube in his hand when he was killed.