The Eater of Darkness, page 10
“Do you know the address of the New Republic?” asked Charles. “I’ve already been through the Liberator, Nation, Aesthete, Dial and Vanity Fair. The man I’m looking for I don’t know where he hangs out.”
The old gentleman cast a sly grin downward.
“Your literary friend?”
“There are seven incentives to murder,” Charles replied. “So far I’ve tried three: curiosity, sex-fatigue, and boredom.” He patted the focal barrel with comforted eyes. “What’s up tonight?” he asked.
The old gentleman opened a brief-case containing maps, diagrams, key-molds, etc. “Well,” he began. “I think we’d better rehearse the City Mercantile Bank affair. …”
“How many?”
“Eighteen men. The night watchman, four special police, the driver and two guards of the armored car, the teller and assistant teller of the bank, the agent of the Burgeson, Rich Company, our two grifters and the driver of the car I’ve engaged. …” The old gentleman paused, smiling softly up at Charles. “It’s always better to get rid of one’s accomplices, don’t you think?”
Charles nodded grimly. “That makes only fourteen,” he commented.
The old gentleman waved a hand. “Well, and the usual number of innocent bystanders,” he explained. Charles nodded comprehension.
“Eighteen. . . .” he murmured.
They were silent a moment. A moment, compassion sat heavy on the withers of Charles Dograr’s pride. His jaws flattened with pity. The old gentleman observed, and his gaze fell, like a caress from his crooked old fingers, on the wavy locks of our hero’s careless head and internally he gave unctuous approval. Then Charles was brusk again.
“I noticed the car downstairs.”
“The Hispano–yes.”
“Fast work then—eh?”
“It may be. I thought we’d better be sure. It means nineteen millions.”
Charles leaned back in his chair. “In gold?”
“Gold coin.”
“What time?”
“The armored car with the shipment comes to the bank at exactly midnight.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
There was silence. The heavy yellow brilliance of the room showered like whispering gold on the two. “Nineteen millions. …”
“That’s enough for a while, eh?” urged the old gentleman. His eye grew suddenly waterily piteously beseeching.
“We might go away for a time. … eh, Charles? With nineteen millions. We’ll buy a yacht, what do you say, Charles? I saw the very thing in the harbor yesterday, coming in from Long Island. … Gibraltar … the Mediterranean. … Monaco. … Suez. How would you like that, Charles? With your old partner. … Alone. … Ah! …” He had flopped forward on the floor.
On his knees on the floor before Charles amazed, and clutching for his hand like an old woman in a Victorian novel. “Just we two, Charles. Alone there … on the blue water. I have dreamed of it! I have longed for it—haven’t you seen?—since that first night when we—murdered that man out in Union Hill—we, together.
“Must I confess? He was the first … the first time I had ever raised my hand to kill! It was your young fiery energy that nerved me to it!” He gave way to a fit of throaty laughter. Charles felt his thighs prickle into gooseflesh. “But that night—that night, I could have dipped my hands into his warm blood—dipped it up with my two hands and blessed you with it, to consecrate our love. Charles, do you hear? Our love!”
His eyes glared wildly. Charles, drawn back deep in his chair, saw them as a man, alone on a narrow road at night, sees the headlights of a motorcar approaching swiftly, roaring.
And the old gentleman’s voice went on, the words coming hoarsely as if some hot inner blast were forcing them through the taut channels of his throat. “You know—you must know that I love you! My money! The ardor of my soul! The pride of my intellect! I throw them all at your feet! Charles! … (There was an air of theatricality about it all. Mae West in a more advanced moment might have done the scene. Charles waited). … Charles! Ah! Charles! We shall defy them all! We will shrivel their brains! Like burnt walnuts! And blood! Blood! Blood!”
He was scrambling to his feet now, his hand crawling toward the boy’s planed face.
But Charles now (the moment of horror passed) could almost have laughed, in fact did—insofar as a twisted contortion of the lips, a flaring release of the tensed facial muscles can be called laughter.
He saw with a cold skilled eye the sweat that stood on the old gentleman’s forehead, saw the sagging, chattering, lecherous mouth.
And still—“Nineteen millions! It shall be yours and nineteen more, and ninety more as well … and all the wealth of Ind. … All the jewels of Araby! All, all yours … if you but say one word—one word! Ah! Charles! Speak! Speak! …”
Charles for a moment sat on the top of the world as (with a decided gesture) like a man putting out a candle he extinguished all emotion, pushing the old gentleman pivotting away.
“What nonsense!” he rasped. And, with the naked assurance of youth, “How about this City Mercantile Bank? Let’s stick to business.”
The moment that followed must be allowed to weigh with centuries. Man is the toy of Fate, but the emotion within him is like the gravity wheel that, once whirling, propels the child’s locomotive up impossible slopes. Arrested, in the one case it crumples the painted plaything—in the other it disrupts the mind and all the plans of men. During that moment the old gentleman had turned his head away, moving his hands across his features like a quick-change artist preparing for the next act.
Then his head rotated on his wrinkled neck. He was seen to be smiling.
“Ah! yes!”—but his voice came gaspingly—“The eighteen men!” (But, “Nineteen!” a demoniac whispering in his brain.)
“That’s better!” approved Charles, uncomprehending.
“We’ll rehearse tonight.”
“How about the three grifters? They all here?”
“In the next room—” Each word had been like clicking a camera shutter. Now his voice broke. And—“Ah! Charles!” once again he was pleading. “The world shall ring with our names, if you but speak. … Dograr—sweet sound!—and Picrolas; indivisibly joined to the fat world’s horror. … Dograr and Picrolas! … Picro. …”
“Picrolas!” The boy’s voice blanched. “Picrolas!!” And the air in the silent room rang like the lip of a bell at the fated syllables and fear ran down through the boy’s belly like a skewer through butter. “Picrolas! You–are—Picrolas?”
The old gentleman’s face before him was like a knot of green and yellow yarn, untwisting. But the mouth preserved its deadly, even smile.
“You know. … You have heard … of Picrolas?”
The voice came to him distantly; the smile poniarded his vision. Who—who living had not heard and, hearing, feared the dread name? Who, as the arch-fiend’s tale of crime and desolation had unrolled before the eyes of a startled world, had not felt his eyes grow hot with tears—his heart cold with shame that humanity could harbor so deadly a viper. Men, hearing his iniquities, had sworn that no mother surely, but some devil must have borne him. Frail women’s hair had grown white in a single night, simply at reading a newspaper account (and one no doubt censored) of but one of his misdeeds.
Picrolas! Charles felt his courage shrivel now. He shuddered, and the man’s grinning face loomed evilly before him.
Two months they had been together now and their crimes had been many and foul enough, as they wielded the x-ray bullet.
But it had been (or Charles had thought it so) lighthearted and young. He had quieted his soul—the old, old story!—with a list of his misfortunes, with a tale of the world’s misdeeds. He pictured himself a latter-day cavalier, a modern Robin Hood, astride the machine as the others bestrode their horses. He had told himself that he had robbed the rich to feed the poor. He had—ah! now, with a sickened courage he looked back at it all; he knew now the hideous brain that had urged him on; he saw himself for the fool that he had been.
“Picrolas!”
The old gentleman’s smile took on a metallic brilliance. “You—fear—Picrolas?” he asked softly.
The boy was beyond words.
“Say but one word. …” the voice came softly, cajolingly, “One word, and you need not fear him.” Under it all was the grimace.
“No! No! Come what will I—” Charles Dograr had risen to his feet. The old gentleman’s hand halted him.
“Sh-h-h-h!”
Someone was knocking gently at the door. A moment, when both stared at the other. Then Charles Dograr rose, strode across the room. Anything was better than this inactivity! He opened. Three faces emerged in the gloom—the faces of men steeped in vice, hardened in crime.
They were the three accomplices of the multiple murder the old gentleman had planned for the morrow night.
At another time, Charles would have smiled with mocking courage at their twisted lips, glittering eyes and cut-throat visages—would have vaunted himself for the power he held over them and their ilk.
Now, he could hardly keep countenance before them, for the shame that clamored at his heart. One spoke:
“Whinever yeze arre ready sorr, thin we do be surely,” he announced in his laughable Irish brogue. It was a burly, broken-nosed ruffian.
Another, dark, thin, venomous, concurred. “Sure, Let’s get-a da woik done. It be much-a late-a.” One saw he was of Italian origin.
“Come in, gentlemen.” The old gentleman welcomed them with ironic courtesy, but his eye bored ever at Charles. “Sit down.”
And then (perhaps God, looking down, may have (no other, in the sleeping city, could have) seen in that lit room) three brutish men and a brown-haired, fair-faced boy, coached and guided by a wry-eyed old gentleman, went through the preparations for a great crime.
It might have been a game they played, for all evidence to the casual eye (if the casual eye could have overlooked the grim, set faces of the participants, and the anxious instructions of the old gentleman).
First, maps appeared. All the possibilities of the locality were canvassed—even, with chairs and desk and cushions, a miniature map of the scene was made. Then, down to the smallest detail, the part that each man was to play was memorized, the old gentleman supervising. And strange it was to see these blackguards, as each his turn devolved, rise like schoolchildren to recite his lesson. There was much they did not understand.
“Sure, I get-a you. I drives around-a tha corner and-a—”
“No! Not around it. Drive to the corner and stop there!” corrected the old gentleman. “In that way you block both approaches.”
“All-a right-a,” the Italian assented, it seemed to Charles with an ill grace. “I drive to tha corner-a. An’ I jumps out wit me gun.”
“Only don’t worry about your gun,” advised the old gentleman impatiently. The ruffian stared.
“You said-a dey was eighteen o’ dem!”
“That’ll all be taken care of.” Proudly, Picrolas patted the barrel of the x-ray gun. “I will take care of that.”
“You? But yez said, sorr, that yez wouldn’t be there surely.”
“I won’t.” The men looked bewilderedly at each other. Charles smiled. The old gentleman turned to him and for a moment their glances met in the old derisive camaraderie.
Then Charles hardened and he turned away. But, for a long time, the old gentleman’s eye, unnoticed, was pinned to the young man’s face.
Charles had been thinking he noticed something that recollected the face of one of the men to his mind. The man wore a derby hat.
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere?” he asked. It was a burly, swaggering fellow.
“Me?” The man pictured surprise. “Naw. I just got in from Niagara Falls today.”
“Oh?” Charles thought little more of it. And yet, in the back of his brain as, glibly, he ran through the recital of his part of the crime’s consummation, there lingered a faint, evasive memory. A blonde man … with a derby hat … he had walked in fear … of what? … one early morning. …
“You were never in New York before?”
The fellow shook his head negatively.
Half an hour later, the old gentleman professed himself satisfied with the rehearsal and dismissed them.
“Till tomorrow!” Then he turned to Charles. “Do not go, Charles. One word before …”
Bruskly, Charles tore his sleeve from the man’s grasp; he spoke not a word in reply, but signalled ahead to the man in the derby hat.
“Wait a minute there,” he called. “I’ll walk down with you.”
Left alone, the old gentleman walked heavily across the room until he stumbled almost blindly against the mechanism of the x-ray rifle. He laid his head between his arms on the polished surface. For a time, he wept. Then, suddenly, he raised his head again and his face was horrible to behold. And he raised his clenched hands to Heaven, and his voice came choked with passion.
“Fool!” he gasped. “Twice-triple accursed fool! You spurn me–me, Picrolas! Ha! Ha! You fool, know you not that the power still rests here—with me? Nineteen shall die tomorrow! Nineteen! Here—I swear it! Yourself—you have sealed your doom! Tomorrow’s sun shall be your last, or Picrolas is forsworn!”
* * *
1 Var. 1915 ed. “. … in the Smart Set, don’t you think?”]
11–YONKERS—AND WEST
(a) Mr. Rupert Pragman put the bottle of milk under his left arm and opened the door with his right. Hurriedly he entered the house. His wife was standing impatiently in the diningroom.—“Hurry up and sit down to your dinner. The nice tunafish on toast I made that you like’ll be all cold,” she said.—“Did anybody come while I was away?” asked Mr. Pragman.—“No. I think that detective stuff of yours is all a fake,” she said. “Sit down to the table,” she added.—“Well, all right,” Mr. Pragman agreed. They sat down and ate the tunafish on toast.—“It certainly was pretty good,” said Mr. Pragman afterward.
(b) “Well, let’s see what we can get on the radio,” suggested Mr. Pragman to his wife.—“All right, Rupert,” said she. Just then there was a knock on the door.—“You go see who it is,” said Mr. Pragman.—“No. It’s your turn,” said his wife. He opened the door. A stranger stood on the doorstep. Summoning up all his courage, Mr. Pragman proposed, “EGGS ARE INDETERMINATE BUT FOWLS ARE FIRM.” The stranger bowed. He was a distinguished-looking foreigner.1 He spoke with a slight accent.2 “IF MOSCOW REVERSES SELL AT ONCE!”—“Come in,” said Mr. Pragman.—“We have no time to lose,” said the stranger.—“Just a minute till I get my hat,” said Mr. Pragman. He got his hat. They went out together. Mrs. Pragman, when left alone, sat down by the radio. She began fiddling with the dials. Two minutes later the machine shuddered and burst into flames. At the same time a heavy brilliance scalloped her brains. The poor woman was dead.3
(c) Pragman and the stranger got onto the Subway.—“I suppose you’re from Foster R. Foster,” asked Pragman timidly.—“Ssh! That is not his real name,” said the stranger. “His real name is Charles Dograr!”4—“He told me he was working on the Trulge Murder Case,” said Pragman.—“He was,” said the stranger.5
(d) “Come in here,” said the stranger, pausing before a pawnshop when they had got to Chicago. They went in and the stranger bought a little gilt locket. They went out in the street again and opened it. In the back was a picture of a little, fair-haired girl. The stranger looked at it for some time. “We must hurry,” said he at last. They turned down a side street.
(e) Toward the end of Halstead Street, somebody shot at them from an upper window. The stranger preserved his sang-froid.—“Take the number of that house,” he said. Pragman took the number down in a little notebook he always carried. The stranger paused at an ashcan. He pulled out a worn old broom. With a magnifying glass he studied the handle. Then he went to a drugstore and bought some bichloride tablets.—“These are a deadly poison,” he said, showing them to Pragman and smiling mysteriously.—“Oh! Are they?” asked Pragman.—“Let us go in and buy a couple dozen bananas,” said the stranger. “We have a long journey before us.” They went in and bought the bananas. Coming out of the store, a dark-bearded man ran past them and disappeared in an apartment house, crying: “Eighteen men! Eighteen men!” It was only one of the curious events of the day.
(f) Dawn found them in Erie, Pennsylvania. The stranger told Pragman to wait a minute while he went into a grocery store. Pragman waited and the stranger went into the grocery store. He conversed for a long time with the proprietor. When he came out he had a can of tomatoes and looked pleased.—“I had to buy these tomatoes so as he wouldn’t get suspicious,” he explained. “But I found out the man we are after is an old fellow, very mathematical, and he deserted his wife six years ago in this town. What will we do with this can of tomatoes?”—“Eat them?” asked Pragman.—“What we better do, we better go see this man’s wife. She lives right around the corner,” said the stranger. “Have you got the number of that house in Chicago? he added.—“No 436,” replied Pragman.—“It’s the same number. Wait here till I get the morning editions,” said the stranger. They were full of all the details about the Nine Prominent Critics Die By X-Ray Bullet, and it went on to relate how reason shuddered when the city waked up today to find that such men as Harry Hansen, William Soskin, Heywood Broun, Bruce Gould, Waldo Frank, Henry Seidl Canby, Asa Huddleberry and James Thurber and George Jean Nathan were made the victims of a dastardly attack late last night and the police were hopelessly at sea because no motive could be imagined for the murders unless by the Communists from Moscow. The stranger looked worried. Then his brow cleared.— “Well, anyway, Adeline is safe,” he muttered.6 — “Do we go see the wife?” queried Pragman.— “No. We have to hurry back to New York. I have got to report to the Chief,” said the stranger. “You come along too.”
