Murder Impossible Page 5

  'No, but I keep strict accounts. I misjudged her once. I owe her something for that.'

  At 6:30 Nichols lifted the phone in his office, recognized Kincaid's voice and asked, 'How's Daphne?'

  'Safe. I sent her to stay with friends, but she still needs her Uncle Clifford. If we don't provide Ergon with a berth in the gas-chamber, Cliff will put a bullet through that bald head of his one fine day and the girl will wind up in Ergon's Temple.'

  'You're tearing my heart out, but it's no dice, friend. The laboratory evidence is in. Ergon didn't shoot Colonel Lathrop.'

  'You don't doubt he's responsible for the colonel's death, do you?'

  'How could he be?'

  'I'll tell you how—if you have your men take him to his apartment. You bring Major Lathrop with you and pick me up in front of the Public Library at seven sharp.'

  'The Public Library!'

  'That's right—and bring a police stenographer so he can take down a confession.' The phone clicked in Nichols' ear.

  The watch on the lieutenant's wrist stood at one minute to seven as the big police car rolled to a stop in front of the Public Library. Kincaid greeted Nichols and Major Lathrop and introduced the man standing beside him on the curb.

  'This is Svetozar Vok. He's doing a magic act at the Paramount and he has another show to play tonight so tell your driver not to dawdle.'

  As the car roared away, the Lieutenant turned to Vok.

  'I saw your show and it's good, but if Kincaid brought you to look for hanky-panky in this case, he's wasting your time. The colonel used the gun this afternoon and his prints would be on it anyway, so we can't actually prove he shot himself. What we can prove is that he was alone in the room and nobody else could've got in or out. The gun was beside him, and the bullet was fired from that gun. What's more, three people saw Ergon come out of his own apartment within half a minute after they heard the shot. That gives him a holeproof alibi, so there isn't any trick for you to find.'

  'Mr. Kincaid did not seek my aid as conjuror,' said Vok, 'but as hypnotist.'

  'Hypnotist? What the hell's that got to do with it?'

  'Perhaps everything. Mr. Kincaid and I have made discovery about this Ergon. When he left the Lathrop apartment this afternoon he promised to "intercede with the Forces" in an effort to preserve the colonel's life. However, the chant which he actually made was not an intercession but rather an incantation—something in the nature of a curse.'

  Major Lathrop nodded. 'Said so myself.'

  'Your instinct was right, but we have proof. Kincaid has a keen ear for sound and he remembered the refrain. I recognized it as 'Lodd fobe magad!’ which is Hungarian for "You will blow out your brains!" I myself am Czech, but I speak Hungarian, and that also may be important.'

  'None of it's important to me,' said Nichols. 'This Ergon sure as hell didn't kill the colonel with any Hungarian curse.'

  'Of course not. The words merely show that Ergon lied and that his intentions were evil. His talk of the "the Forces" and "intercession" was a blind. I suggest that what he actually did was to hypnotize the colonel and force him to shoot himself.'

  'Baloney! You can't hypnotize a guy into shooting anybody else, let alone himself. Everybody knows that.'

  'Everybody except the men who know something about hypnosis.' Vok produced a slim volume and handed it to the lieutenant. 'I borrowed that for you at the library. Read it when you have time. It is by a professor at the college of Cornell named Esterbrook. In it he makes clear that it is impossible to know whether a hypnotized subject will commit a crime unless you actually have him commit a real one. Naturally no students of hypnosis will take that responsibility.'

  'You could load a gun with blanks and . . .'

  'Then it would cease to be a real crime, and the subject would be aware of that fact. Our friend Kincaid is an expert at reading men's minds from tiny clues which most men do not notice, but even Kincaid is a novice at that compared with the most stupid hypnotic subject. What the hypnotist knows, the subject may know, so experiments with mock crimes are meaningless. We shall not be certain whether a man can be forced to commit a real crime by hypnotism until someone actually uses a real crime for experiment.'

  'And you think Ergon's done it?'

  'What other explanation is there?'

  'I don't know, but hell, even if you're right, we'd never get an indictment.'

  'We may, if we approach the matter properly. I myself am not without hypnotic experience. I propose to match my power against Ergon's and force him to confess his guilt.'

  'What good'll that do? If you mesmerize a guy into confessing, it won't stand up in court any more than if you beat it out of him with a rubber hose.'

  The lieutenant was still arguing when the car pulled up before the row of apartment buildings, but Kincaid silenced him. 'Come on, Al. You can't be any worse off than you are now, and at least Vok will find out the facts.'

  When the elevator left them on the second floor, Vok turned to Nichols. 'This Ergon is evidently an experienced hypnotist—stronger than I, it may be. If I am to succeed I must gain at the outset the advantage. You four shall go first and leave the door open. I will come suddenly and address him in Hungarian. He will not expect that. It may throw him off balance. Then perhaps I can force him to confess in English.'

  'Suppose you miss?'

  'Then, my friend, you will have to use every means in your power to prevent me killing myself. For rest assured, Ergon will try to force me to do so.'

  They traversed the corridor on tiptoe, not quite knowing why.

  Nichols rapped on the door. When one of the two policeman set to watch Ergon responded, Vok stepped back and the others filed into the apartment.

  The living room was identical to the one in the Lathrop apartment but reversed as in a mirror. Even the light brackets on either side of the mantel were duplicated. However, this room contained neither furniture nor pictures, only a carpet of coarse matting which reached from wall to wall. Ergon sat cross-legged before the fireplace, his linen robe breaking in stiff folds and his hands hidden in his wide sleeves. The eyes in the motionless face were wide open but they stared straight ahead without even a glance at the newcomers.

  'Csirkefogo!’ Suddenly Vok was in the room. The Hungarian caught Ergon unawares. His eyes flicked upward and in that moment Vok was standing before him with bony hands outstretched.

  'Gazember!’ Ergon rose to his feet as if lifted by an unseen power. The great bell notes of his voice boomed out with calm dignity.

  The man radiated power. Lieutenant Nichols had to dig his fingernails into the palms of his hands to keep them from trembling.

  He was certain that Vok was beaten, and if he were, God alone knew what would happen to the rest of them.

  For a full minute Czech and Hungarian stood face to face. Vok took full advantage of his great height, but he lacked the other's calm, and now that Ergon had recovered his poise Vok's words seemed to have no more effect than a dust storm might have upon the great pyramid.

  Nichols' hands grew wet, but whether from perspiration or from blood drawn by his nails he did not know, nor could he take his eyes from the strange duel in the centre of the room for long enough to find out.

  Neither of the antagonists moved, but if they had blasted each other with machine-guns the strain on the watchers could hardly have been greater. Little by little Ergon appeared to gain the upper hand. His voice became richer and more confident while Vok's showed a tendency to waver. Nichols expected the Czech to break at any moment. Then suddenly Vok said something in a new tone, and his long arm pointed to the wall behind the other man. Ergon's poise cracked and he stole a quick glance over his shoulder in the direction indicated by the magician's outstretched hand. Vok laughed in triumph and spoke three more words in measured accents like a man driving nails into a coffin.

  The result was a kind of satanic miracle. Ergon's face changed for the first time, but it was merely a new expression. The bronze features seemed
to run together as though melted in a crucible. The power that supported him had left him, and he seemed to collapse before their eyes.

  Vok turned his back scornfully on Ergon, and spoke in English. 'You may take this despoiler of orphans and destroy him, Lieutenant. He killed Colonel Lathrop.'

  'You mean he hypnotized him?'

  'Not he. He is a poor fraud with no power—only effrontery. This afternoon he insisted that Mr. Kincaid leave the room. The box of matched target-pistols which the brothers shot every day was on a table beside the fireplace. Ergon took two of these pistols. One he kept, the other he placed on the floor out of sight in the shadows under the edge of the couch.'

  'With the colonel and the major both looking at him?'

  Vok smiled. 'My friend, I do a hundred more difficult things every day with a thousand people looking at me, and I do not wear a loose robe under which anything may be hidden, nor do I conceal my hands like this poor fraud who wore gloves so that he would not mar the colonel's prints on the revolvers. The gun he left on the floor served only as a dummy. He knew Mr. Kincaid and Major Lathrop would not touch it before the police arrived. The other gun he brought here, to his own apartment where he used it to shoot the colonel. Afterwards he went back to the Lathrop apartment, put the gun with which he had murdered the colonel on the floor, and returned the gun he had used as a dummy to its box.'

  Nichols exploded. 'Are you trying to tell me Ergon shot Colonel Lathrop from this apartment?'

  'Precisely.'

  'Sure, right through the wall without leaving a hole.'

  'That is true. He shot through the wall and he left no hole. Do you see that light fixture to the right of the fireplace? There is another just opposite it in the Lathrop apartment, and the walls are thin. Ergon could remove the one on this side at will, and it would be easy to rig the other so that it could be swung out of the way to leave a hole large enough for a pistol barrel to pass through—a barrel whose muzzle was less than a foot from the forehead of Colonel Lathrop as he bent to pick up his walnut box from the table by the fireplace.'

  While Vok talked, Ergon had been gathering himself together. Now, without warning, he launched himself at the magician's throat.

  Rogan and the two policemen caught him. In his rage he seemed hardly to notice them, but strained forward, cursing Vok in gutter English and convicting himself with every word, while the police stenographer's flying fingers raced to keep pace with him.

  When Ergon stopped from sheer weariness, Vok stepped back and gestured to Nichols.

  'There is your man, Lieutenant—confession and all.'

  'I told you the confession was no good if he's hypnotized.'

  'Oh, he's not—merely hysterical. Mr. Kincaid saw through Ergon's murder trick at once. However, Kincaid was afraid there would not be any positive evidence, so he brought me in to see if I could not draw our friend out.'

  Nichols stared. 'You mean you didn't mesmerize him? That was just a gag?'

  'Exactly. We wanted you and your men to play your parts well and we could not rely on your acting ability.' Vok smiled. 'You see, Lieutenant, a confession obtained by either hypnotism or the third degree would be thrown out of court, but there is no law against using showmanship.'

  VINCENT CORNIER

  The Courtyard of the Fly

  Vincent Cornier (1898-1976) clearly had a most unusual mind. Something of a polymath, he threw all kinds of arcane knowledge into his fiction— mainly written for British magazines of the 1920s and 1930s—and tended to produce stories that verged on the strange, the bizarre, the outré, sometimes straying over into sheer fantasy.

  A Yorkshireman by birth (though manifestly not by inclination, Yorkshiremen being famously a hard-headed and down-to-earth breed, not given to extravagant flights of fancy), he had a lively youth. Gassed in the First World War after spending ten months in France, he was discharged from the BEF but then re-enlisted in the RAF in 1918. A short period in Ireland just prior to the main Troubles was followed by four years prowling round Middle Europe and the Near East reporting for the Press Association on the various post War political and military upheavals, including the bloody riots in Vienna (where he attended the university) and the failed attempt of ex-Emperor Karl of Austria to regain his throne.

  Yet although he sometimes wrote of Secret Service work his stories were surprisingly un-action-oriented, Cornier preferring pure puzzles to physical conflict and the harsh clamour of automatic weaponry. And what puzzles! In 'The Shot That Waited' a man is shot by a 200-years old bullet coming from nowhere; in the breathtaking 'Dust of Lions' spontaneous combustion occurs simultaneously in Transylvania, at the North Pole, and in a secluded London Square, and is, moreover, explained away effortlessly.

  Sometimes Cornier relied on perfectly fair general knowledge. In a story I stumbled across, 'The Million Water', the explanation of the impossibility depends on knowing a simple geographical fact of the kind printed on the backs of matchboxes or (for those whose memories stretch back that far) at the tops of most pages in the Wizard, Rover and Adventure. On other occasions—as Cornier authority Dr Stephen Leadbeatter has pointed out— there is a strong suspicion that imagination supplied an answer where dull reality has failed to come up with the goods.

  In the 1940s Ellery Queen discovered Cornier and printed a number of his stories, some old, some new. Then he faded into obscurity. A volume of his dazzling tales is long overdue.

  JACK ADRIAN

  Some thirty-seven years ago, when the pages of the Almanac de Gotha were slim passports to the narrowest society civilization has yet produced, a cartouche with the word 'Labordien' appeared within its yellow backing. Around and about the name were seven royal escutcheons. None of your 'by appointment to—'; not even the indiscretion of an address.

  Those were unnecessary. Everyone knew that Henri Labordien was a master artist in the craft of pearl mounting. Henri Labordien and pearls were not to be thought of apart. Nations, through their rulers, trusted him with awesome treasures; and trust continued until that night which was marked by the appearance of the fly and the subsequent loss of a Russian Grand Duchess's rope of superbly matched pearls.

  The fly (according to Henri Labordien and Tobias Lockwood, the only other man to see it) was a black and orange monstrosity as large as a mouse. It darted with a rapidity that was swifter than the bolt of a swallow. It hissed.

  Oh, yes, it hissed—a tremulous and poignant sound like a horny finger slashed across silk. Henri Labordien heard the noise coming to him; Tobias Lockwood had heard it going away, yet each agreed that this was its nature.

  Now here was a fly that was unlike one's ordinary experience of flies, in appearance and faculty. The police, investigating the mystery of the vanished Russian treasure, paid a great deal of attention to it. One of their company, a constable called Hamilton—afterwards destined to become Superintendent Hamilton of the C.I.D.—went so far as to roughen his fingertips with pumice and to draw them, a hundred times, over silken fabric, until his ears were educated to the sound these other men had heard.

  What he could not experiment with was any known species of the insect world capable of clawing up a rope of pearls weighing a quarter of a pound and flying away with it.

  According to Henri Labordien and Tobias Lockwood, that was what this fly had done.

  Labordien had been sitting at his bench by an open window in his riverside house—the June evening was glowering and sultry with impending storm—when out of the sombre twilight the big fly darted into his workroom. He heard it hiss past him and turned to follow its flight. Before he could take the jewellers' eyeglass from his right eye, the fantastic insect went out again into the open air. Somewhat startled, Labordien got to his feet and picked up a welt of leather in order to crush the thing if it came back. It was loathsome and it looked deadly, as though it carried venom. In his opinion it was a phenomenon hatched from some cargo of subtropical fruit—bananas or such—carried by the Thames barges that were always passing thi
s suburb of London. That was, of course, his later and considered opinion. At the moment of reaching out for the piece of leather he had no time for ordered thought.

  Even as his hand touched the sheepskin, the big fly came back. This time it alighted on the long string of pearls laid upon his workbench. For a second or so it quivered, then it rose and went out of the window for the last time. The Dmitrioevitsch pearls went with it, and the world famous Henri Labordien was ruined.

  Stuttering with astonishment, shaking his head, he saw the glitter of the gems and the sullen mass of the great fly going into evening space. Among some plane trees, at the end of his courtyard, fringing the narrow road before the river embankment, fly and necklace disappeared.

  He could not lean out of the window at once, since the littered expanse of the bench prevented him; but after a moment, when he had swept aside his tools and cabinets and gold and soldering plant, he clambered up and shrieked for aid. So urgent was his call that half a dozen people were thronging his little courtyard in a matter of two to three minutes. Among them were his nextdoor neighbour Colonel Brough, the constable Hamilton, and Tobias Lockwood—a shabby and pallid faced man who clawed at P.C. Hamilton even as that officer came towards the door.

  To a heterogeneous crowd, then, Henri Labordien told of his loss. Therein lay his greatest mistake. It might have been possible, had his tale not been given such publicity, for him to carry on with his craft for years to follow. The affair might have been hushed up. Peculiarly enough, Labordien's story was corroborated by this out-of-work clerk, Tobias Lockwood. After P.C. Hamilton had cleared the courtyard of all save Labordien, Colonel Brough, Lockwood and himself, he listened to a second narrative of the hideous fly.

  It appeared that Lockwood was sauntering along the embankment, beneath the gently stirring planes, when a rattle on the pavement attracted his attention. To his amazement he looked down to see a lane of shimmering jewels—undoubtedly the lost pearls—almost at his feet. For a time all conscious action ebbed from Lockwood's body. He simply halted, petrified with astonishment, and gaped at the fortune. Before he could find it in himself to pick up the necklace, the fly was in the air again. Straight for his face it came.