The Complete Simon Iff (44 page)

"Now think again. What can Mr. Greil wish to crack? Mr. Greil though? Would he, for the sake of a hundred dollars, take such a long chance as to bring the broken machine down to your room and take yours up to his? Unlikely. It must be a subordinate of Greil's. Someone who would fear the result of the discovery of what had happened.

"So much for the who, for it turns out that Greil has only one subordinate. Now turn to the why, shall we?

"What in Heaven's name can a clerk - a girl in an office - want to crack in such a hurry, with so awkward an anvil, in a place where discovery meant trouble? Why not take it home and smash what had to be smashed?

"I could only think of one thing - a chain. I call up my friend Teake, of the Police. The only escaped prisoner in the offing is one Ned Grattan, arrested that same afternoon for forgery. So I trotted up to Greil's office and got the girl to tell me the whole story. You may be glad to learn, Mr. Gatt, that she has sent your cashier a hundred dollars in payment for the borrowed machine."

Gatt somehow felt uncomfortable, though he could hardly have told why. Possibly it was some side-consciousness of the monocle of Captain Lascelles, which appeared to be aimed at a piece of cheese, hull down, of low visibility.

"I say, Mr. Gatt," drawled the owner of this formidable engine of offence in a thin dry far-away voice, "the fact is, Mr. Iff and I have come about a little matter of sport. You see, this fellow Grattan is the only man that can beat our first string, Bruce of Balliol, for the Diamond Sculls at Henley this summer, and you can imagine that naturally we don't want him to compete. We just thought we might do something, see? And I remembered that you were prominent as a Kingsbridge man, aren't you? and you certainly don't want to see a Youghal man pull off anything, do you? Eh?"

"We don't want him to stroke Youghal this spring, surely," said Gatt. "If we lick 'em, our eight goes to Henley."

"That will be A.1., then, if he's in quod over this forgery, what?"

"I'm concerned deeply," put in Simon Iff; "you get him all right, but he keeps on escaping."

"Lookee here," exclaimed Gatt, in a burst of confidence, feeling himself a person of international importance. "There's a pot of money behind this, bets, and all that. So we put that little law through up at Albany to frame him. Only they've got Youghal fans in the police, and they always manage to let him go. There's a hell of a leak somewhere. So we thought we'd fix him proper with a forgery charge. More serious, you understand. We got a hand-picked judge or two, and we'll have it dead to rights. If he did escape, they couldn't let a convicted forger row for them. Besides, the Federal Government would be on to it. You can sleep easy, gentlemen. Grattan won't row."

"Thank you very much," said Simon Iff. "Captain Lascelles will now fire his monocle."

The navel officer turned on Mr. Gatt, as who should sight a periscope among a welter of drowned women and children.

"Sir," he said, and his voice sounded at least three thousand miles away, "would you kindly inform the Pi Omicron Xi Frat - I do not think you need inform the Kingsbridge Boat Club - I hope not - that unless Ned Grattan rows for Youghal against you, and unless he competes in the Diamonds, we in England shall not race against any Kingsbridge crew. And we shall publish the reasons for our decision."

"Good gracious, you don't mean it," stammered Gatt. "This is a joke, Captain, of course."

"Judging from the expression of Captain Lascelles, Mr. Gatt, my opinion is that he was never quite so serious in his life." Simon smiled cheerfully.

"Damn it! I don't understand it. I thought you were a sportsman."

"From that," said Lascelles stiffly, "I beg to be excused."

"But you can't want your own man beaten!" wailed Gatt.

"No," said Iff. "We want him to win. Now I put it to your very strong common sense, how can he win without an opponent? He must have an opponent, in his own interest, you see that? Then we must not be stingy about it; we must get him the best opponent available."

"Iff," said Lascelles, "forgive me, but your humour is ill-timed. Personally, I can't stick this. Come and dine at the club to-night. Righto!

"Here, waiter, take this. It's my check."

He gave the man a twenty-dollar bill, and walked out without another glance at Gatt.

"Mr. Iff," said that unhappy man, "what in hell am I to do?"

"Read your Bible," replied the magician. "Eleventh Commandment, as you know: Thou shat not be found out. Twelfth: When you are, play the game. I don't want this filthy business published. Kingsbridge is as fine as Youghal. It's only you and a low gang of blackguards, with your crooked politicians and your hand-picked judges - you don't stand even for the main body of your Frat. I shall go round to your committee, by the way, and advise them to look into this business, for their own sakes."

"How did you get on to it?" Gatt was twitching his fingers nervously.

"Oh, it was as plain as a headline. Why should any one trouble to frame up this poor hardworking devil? (He has a damned fine girl, by the way.) He was a nobody. Personel jealousies wouldn't explain it. Ned Grattan, somehow or other, was a public character. Of course: Sport. That told me at once: Kingsbridge was the only rival worth considering. I had no idea you were in it, of course; Lascelles meant to deliver his ultimatum to you merely as a convenient ambassador. That was why he put things - er - the wrong way round; and you very kindly gave yourself away.

"And now I must confess that his attitude has somewhat hypnotised me; I am feeling exceedingly unwell, and I will stroll up to your Frat House while you explain to your false witnesses and hand-picked judges that it won't do this time."

He got up and walked away.

That summer the Youghal eight only lost to First Trinity in the final, and Ned Grattan made a dead heat with Bruce of Balliol in the Diamond Sculls.

***

*
The more things change, the more they stay the same, and while I, a non-smoker with a bit of a sinus problem, personally enjoy the current bans on smoking (although professionally I generally oppose bans) and wish they could be more comprehensive, I can certainly understand why Aleister Crowley would have hated the current restrictions against smoking in "public areas". Oh, and by the way, the word "properer" a few paragraphs above this is what was in the original typescript and I am loath to alter the words of the Master Therion.

 - G.M.Kelly

The Boston 'Turkey-Buzzard', having promised Dolores Travis only such publicity as might come through 'legitimate channels, such as the Divorce Court', was genuinely delighted to offer her the hospitality of its columns five months after her marriage, on the occasion of her filing her petition. "Father was right!" she wrote to Simon Iff. "There was nothing there to keep me from the Cult of the Chortoid. Geoffrey, like most American men, if not all, is a neuter. They're lovely to look at - but oh! when you try them out! Thank you so much for sending me dear Alma; she has been more to me than any mere male thing, husband or not, could ever be; and I'm perfectly miserable at having to let her go to France. Of course I shall come down with her and see her safely on the boat. Yours - but my own first of all - truly, Dolores Cass (for ever and ever, Amen)."

Simon Iff chuckled hugely over this letter.

"I knew that girl would find herself," said he. "It was the natural thing to do."

And the same afternoon Dolores got another dose of legitimate publicity by being a yard away from a man who was shot dead in Washington Street by three in an automobile. The bullet only missed her head by inches.

A week later Simon Iff gave the Godspeed dinner to Alma, whom he had finally adopted as his daughter. She had taken to civilization as a swan takes to water, but she still kept that haunting woodland wildness that stamped her as Overwoman, Kin to the Gods.

At three in the morning she did a dance in a leopard skin which brought the swirl of the Sahara sand about the guests.

Dolores Cass, drugged with excitement, beat time on a devil-dancers' drum from Ceylon.

Miss Mollie Madison, with her demure cat's smile, watched the face of the magician. He alone remained aloof; his eyes were inscrutable. But before the party broke up, he retired for a few minutes to his bedroom. He came back wearing a heavy tweed suit and a pair of rubber shoes.

"Sympathetic magick!" he gave as his excuse, "our nightingale flits on to greener woods. I must create in myself the atmosphere of travel, that I may play the Good Samaritan to our fair pilgrim."

Presently the guests were gone; only Dolores and Simon went to the wharf with Alma.

After the last waved handkerchief, Dolores turned to her master. "Do you know what I have in my pocket?"

"Pocket? What will be the end of this Feminist agitation?"

"Silly! I've put my pride in it."

"High time!"

"I've been doing some rather curious work in statistics, and I can't get beyond a certain point. So I'm going to talk it over with you."

"I am glad of it," retorted Simon rather grimly. "You will understand why when I show you what I, for my part, have in my pockets."

"Do you know what I'm talking about?"

No, I don't. Nor do you."

"What do you mean?"

"Why do I take this quite absurd way home? Why did I dismiss the car?"

Dolores suddenly realized that they were passing through unfrequented and disreputable streets.

"In pocket No. 1, observe, a pair of spectacles." He adjusted them.

"But why is the left eye blocked up?"

"It enables me to see..."

His intonation told Dolores that he was deliberately leaving the sentence unfinished, and it threw her into a brown study which lasted several blocks.

"... what is behind me," concluded Simon Iff. At the same moment he threw her bodily into a door-way, and completed the gesture by dropping to the ground, and opening fire with a pair of automatics upon the two ruffians whose bullets whistled past them.

The old man's eye was true, and his hand firm. The men dropped in their tracks before firing a second shot.

"Now," remarked Simon coolly to the astounded girl, "we can go across to the trolley."

"You have really surprised me at last," she said rather faintly. "I never thought you would condescend to use the weapons of the flesh."

"I do so," replied he, "only when escorting rash young ladies who put their heads into hornets' nests."

"I give up!"

"I took a chance on this walk in order to prove the nature of your recent work."

"But you don't know what that is."

"True, but I suspected that you (and not that harmless working tailor) were intended for the victim of those men in the auto, and I thought I would try it out. It was the natural thing to do. Here's Tenth Avenue. Jump on!"

II

When they got to a wealthier district they changed into a taxi, and called at her hotel for her port-folio of papers before returning to the magician's apartment.

She spread them on the table.

"Exhibit A is a humourous article on the Crime Wave of the last few months. It teased me, and I thought I'd look it up. The statistics are quite peculiar in half a dozen ways.

"Firstly, the increase in crime is confined entirely to murder, manslaughter, and homicide. There is a parallel increase in fatal accidents, some of them described as suspicious.

"Secondly, the curve of increase springs with a single bound to its maximum, and remains there with only small fluctuations. This jump took place last October.

"Thirdly, the increase is confined to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Key West, and Galveston, though there is a similar increase of about half the amount in Newport News, San Francisco, and Seattle, and a third in Jacksonville, Tampa, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C.

"All this struck me as very strange. I constructed tables of the occupations of the victims, and found the increase to lie almost entirely with the educated classes. Professions seem fairly well distributed, however, even the clergy being proportionally represented.

"I next read up the reports of all violent deaths, hoping to find some common factor for certain groups. Here again I was disappointed.

"I then chose six of the most mysterious cases at random, and made personal investigations on the spot. It was now that the most surprising circumstance of all disclosed itself. In four of my six cases I found it quite difficult to establish the details of the environment, for the reason that the friends of the dead man were themselves nearly all in some sort of trouble. Some had just died, others were in prison, others had left the state or the country quite suddenly, others were involved in lawsuits, others again in bankruptcy; some were being assailed by scandal, others were sick. It was as if the murderer were some very powerful demon whose malice struck not only the victim but his friends!

"I then took a seventh case, and struck oil at once. My investigation was shaping like a man's nervous system; ganglia here and there in the shape of murders, and fans of lesser misfortunes branching out from each, while a cord of graver troubles marked the direct links between the ganglia. But still I could find no common factor beyond the general obvious grounds of association between the parties concerned."

"So you decided to ask Papa. Very wise. But why didn't you mind what Papa told you about thinking it all out at home? You have gone hunting up these cases, and our 'very powerful demon' has put you on his list as a ganglion, for he tries twice to get you potted. And what do you suppose he will do when he finds you are in with Simon Iff?"

"He will know that it will not take you long to find out the how and the why and the who, as you say. So he will be beforehand with you, if he can."

"Just so. Let's make haste - here are a few obvious points. One: the increase is confined to sea-ports, and varies (roughly speaking) with their importance. Exception: the District of Columbia, and there the victims seem to be people politically prominent, and for the most part connected with sea-ports at that, to judge by the few names I happen to know. Luckily, I'm here on a special mission for the British Admiralty, so this is just my ground. Now most of these people are educated, that is, take active interest in politics, and, as residents of sea-ports, foreign politics concern them particularly. Then again, this campaign of murder - with lesser campaigns corresponding - begins quite suddenly and vigorously in October, as if it had been long prepared, and only awaited the signal. What happened in October? Nothing; on the contrary, things had just settled down after the fuss over Morocco.