“I first met David Ealing in October, 1918.” Koenig began speaking. His voice had that far-off quality of things long ago and remote, overlaid with years and tragedy.
“But first I must go back. I am fifty now. I was thirty-five then in 1918. Before that when I was still younger I had come to America to work in the New York office of a firm of Berlin textile merchants. I worked here six years—until 1914. Then I did what millions of poor, foolish, misguided Germans and Frenchmen and Englishmen and Russians did. I went to war.
“I had a family behind the lines in Munich. No wife or children. I’ve never married. But I had a mother and two sisters and a younger brother. Hugo I He was studying music. He was going to be a cellist in one of the great Berlin orchestras, and he had a sweetheart. He was just a boy—only nineteen—and he enlisted the first month. He thought going to war would be a great adventure. He was killed in the spring of 1915.
“My mother was always delicate. She couldn’t stand the civilian privations. She died the third year. Food was very scarce that third year. My sisters were nurses. One of them was killed. The hospital she was working in was shelled. The Germans weren’t the only ones who shelled hospitals. The English did it and the French. We all did it. It was all part of the whole murderous debauch.
“It murdered your body and debauched your soul!” Koenig’s voice rose, impassioned with the horrible memories of 1914-18.
“I went to war to kill and be killed. But I only killed. I was one of the charmed ones. I never even got what the English used to call a ‘blighty’—a nice, easy wound that invalided you back to the rear, to the peace and quiet and cleanliness of a hospital, away from the bloody, stinking front. For four years I killed. I killed with bayonet and I killed with bullets and grenades and gas and liquid fire.
“In the trenches we lived in slime and muck and filth and vermin. And when we were relieved and went to the rear we lived on cheap women and rotten liquor. Our souls were caught up in that mad, beastly frenzy. We couldn’t live like men because men don’t make war. It’s only beasts that kill and mangle and torture each other. So we lived like beasts. Our souls were dead—dead, rotting and stinking like the corpses that were piled up all around us.
“And yet—” Koenig paused and his voice softened. “Yet sometimes there was a spark, a stirring beneath all the blood and beastliness. There must have been. Otherwise I would never have known David Ealing. He would have been just another one of that unnamed, unnumbered company I had killed and murdered and mutilated and tortured.”
For a few moments there was no sound in the room. Koenig had stopped his pacing now and was seated once more quietly in his chair. Spike had lighted a cigarette, but it hung dead and smokeless from his right hand. His eyes were on Koenig, strangely fascinated.
“It was in October 1918,” Koenig went on. “We were entrenched east of the Meuse in the woods near Samogneux. The trenches held by the Americans were a hundred yards in front of us. Our artillery laid down a barrage and we advanced under cover of it. We struck the Americans at a weak point. We were three to their one.
“I can remember going under the wire, over the top of the American trench. We were using the bayonet. I got two of them with my first lunge down. After that, it was mostly hand-to-hand fighting. We cleaned them out of the trench. Then we charged the dugouts. I rushed into one. There was a man there. He raised his gun, but I raised mine first. He went down on his face, and his helmet slewed over on one side. It looked silly, grotesque that way.
“Something stopped me. I don’t know what it was. At times like that, there’s no reason in what you do. There isn’t even instinct. It’s just mad, silly, berserk fighting. You do things for no reason at all. For no reason at all, I stopped right in the middle of the fighting, stock still there in the dugout. I was all alone. There was a kerosene lamp burning on the table and it cast a feeble light.
“I bent over the man at my feet. He was dead. I couldn’t see his face. He was lying on it, and the helmet was still hitched to his head in that grotesque way. I unfastened the strap, took it off. Then I turned the body over so I could see the face.”
Koenig was silent, the memory of that poignant, long-dead moment pressing in upon him. His voice when he took up the narrative again was full of strange tenderness.
“It wasn’t a man really. It was a boy. He couldn’t have been more than twenty. His eyes were blue and he had hair that was blond and wavy. Just like Hugo’s. Something about him reminded me of Hugo.
Not only physically, but—Well, I had a feeling that he had faced the war like Hugo, light hearted, a great adventure, something glorious and exciting that would soon be over with and then he could go back to his home and his sweetheart. I wondered if this boy had a sweetheart.
“I knelt down beside him and opened his coat. My shot had gone straight through his heart. The inside of his shirt was sticky with blood. There was some on the letters and the photographs he carried in the pocket inside his coat.”
Koenig rose from his chair, walked across the room to the safe, stooped down and turned the knob to the right, left, right. The door swung open. From an inner compartment he drew forth a long, heavy manila envelope tied with cord. He swung the door of the safe shut again and walked over to the table, motioned Spike to his side.
“These, my friend,” he said gently, “are the letters I found in the pocket of David Ealing the day I killed him in a dugout on the Samogneux front in October 1918. Read them.”
Spike’s eyes met Koenig’s, then dropped to the envelope in his hand. Slowly he undid the cord. There were three letters. The writing was faded and the paper yellowed, and along the edges there were dark brown stains.
Cpl. David Ealing
29th Division—116th Infantry
A. E. F.—France
Spike opened the first letter. Snapshots fell out. Two girls arm in arm, in strange long skirts to the ankles, wide sashes, hair puffed out over the ears. They were laughing directly into the camera. One fair, one dark. Spike walked to the window, held the picture up to the light, for it was faded and dim. Maysie Ealing and Linda Crossley—when they were young and still able to laugh. On the back there was an inscription. “Don’t let any of the mademoiselles cut us out.”
The second picture was the dark girl—alone. And she wasn’t laughing in this one. There was a look in her eyes that even the cheap snapshot camera had caught—a look of brooding fear and loneliness—and love. On the back in the same handwriting:
“I’m thinking of you—L.”
Spike unfolded the letter.
“My darling David: It is very late and the house is so quiet and this is the time I like best to write to you. For in this quietness I can feel you near me, I can feel your dear arms…
He put the letter down. It was as if he had invaded some sacred place of the heart, had stirred the ashes of a long dead love that had perished in darkness and tragedy. He felt a shamed intruder, a vandal, but still he read on to the end.
“…and so, dear David, I talk to this other dear David—at least I hope he’s a David—and tell him about his Daddy. He stirred for the first time yesterday and it was like…”
At the end there was a single name—“Linda.” Spike folded the letter, put it back in its envelope. He picked up the second letter. The handwriting was different.
“My dear Son… You don’t know how glad we were to receive your letter and to know that you are still safe behind the lines. Let us hope… Linda comes as often as she can get away from her grandfather and she and Maysie spend most of their time…Did you get the socks and sweater and chocolate I sent to…”
A mother’s letter, trying to cover the fear and dread that ate at her heart with tidbits of family gossip, the minutiae of neighborhood life, and over it all a resolute, heart-breaking cheerfulness, pitiful in its palpable falseness.
The third letter was from Maysie.
“…Don’t worry about anything except keeping yourself out of the way of bullets.
Everything’s going to be all right with Linda. She looks fine an d feels fine and is thrilled about it all……an d see if you can’t get me a soldier sweetheart, too. It gets awfully boring sitting around listening to Linda go on about you hour after hour. I ought to have somebody to come back at her with… I got a raise yesterday but prices are going up… Oh, Buddie dear, we miss you so. If anything should happen—but it won’t, it mustn’t, it can’t. Mother keeps up well but I’m afraid she couldn’t stand up under it if anything happened…”
Spike folded the letters, put them back into the envelope and retied the cord. Koenig’s voice broke through the silence.
“I read those letters for the first time fifteen years ago—in a dugout in France—beside the body of David Ealing with the whole bloody, stinking war crashing and yelling over my head. I’ve read them many times since.
“After the war I went into business in Berlin. My one sister who was left, married and moved to Austria. I was alone. I made money. But my life was ugly and bitter and tasteless. That’s what war did to those that came out of it with their bodies whole. Their spirits were warped and twisted.
“I used to get out those letters and re-read them. Of all the men I’d killed he was the only one I’d ever known. And I felt that I did know him. I could reconstruct his whole pleasant, simple, wholesome life—mother, sister, sweetheart. The ecstasy of those last mad days before sailing. Then France—mud and cold drizzle, trench drill behind the lines, cheap French wine at the estaminet, women too willing, lousy billets, long jolting journeys in crowded trucks.
“Mail from home, the only bright spot in all the muck of war. The letter from his sweetheart telling him. His fears and his pride, his hope and his happiness and his terror, all mixed into one. Afraid for her. Afraid for himself. Afraid he might never get back to her—and to his David-‘At least I hope he’s a David.’
“And then at last the order to move up to the front. Raw, green boys facing that awful hell of fire and death. Trembling inside, trying to armor themselves with tough, masculine indifference. Days in the trenches. Mud up to your ankles if you stepped off the duck boards. Rats as big as cats and as bold. Corpses rotting in the sun. Stench. The constant scream and whine of shells, and every once in a while somebody’s brains flung in your face.
“And then at last, attack. They’re coming, the Boche! The bloody Huns! That’s what their officers told them, but we weren’t bloody Huns, we were just poor, shivering, frightened men—boys, like the shivering, frightened boys we killed. We killed so we wouldn’t be killed. I—Hugo—David Ealing. I killed David Ealing. If I hadn’t he would have killed me. But I killed him first. I murdered him. And ever since then I’ve lived with his murdered soul.
“It got to be an obsession with me. David Ealing and those letters there. It ate into my empty life until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to know the end of the story—the story in which I had played so big a part. So I came to America.”
Koenig had risen now. His back was toward Spike. He was standing with his feet wide apart, his hands clenched, his head thrown back gazing at the wall as if the tragic drama was re-created on its blankness.
“And so I came to America. I found out where Linda Crossley was living. I found out where Maysie Ealing was living. Maysie and her mother. I never told them who I really was. I hid behind the mask of a kindly, old stamp dealer and I won my way into their hearts. And I found out the end of the story.
“Tragedy hadn’t stopped with him. When I killed him I killed three other lives, too. His mother, old, demented with the shock of his death, living and yet dead. His sister, fading, growing old, supporting her mother, unable to leave her, to go to England to her sweetheart. Oh yes, she’d finally gotten herself a sweetheart. It was about six years after the war. A young English chap was over here on business. They fell in love, desperately, irrevocably. But they couldn’t marry. She couldn’t leave her mother to go to England, and he couldn’t leave England to come here. He had younger brothers and sisters. Both of them tied, separated by responsibilities, eating their hearts out, getting older all the time.
“And then there was the third life—Linda. Ah, sweet, lovely Linda, my child! Your little David, the only thing you had left of your great love, torn from you. Never, never to see him as long as that old vulture lived. Never to know where he was or what he was like. Slowly going mad with the weight of your own aching tragedy.
“And I—I was responsible. I had killed him. If I hadn’t it never would have happened. He would have come back. He would have married Linda. And Maysie would have married her English boy. And old Mrs. Ealing would have been a placid, contented grandmother, and life would have been happy. But I had sown tragedy and desolation. I had ruined them.
“But there was a little hope left—something might be saved—something of happiness and contentment. For the old woman, no. Death was best for her. And so I killed her. And now her daughter can marry the man she loves before it’s too late and she’s too old. And I killed Crossley, so that Linda can have the child she loves, before it’s too late and she’s too old.
“You may say that I am demented, mad myself.
But you’re wrong. What I’ve done, I’ve done with the cool, hard light of reason. I don’t believe in an avenging God or a tortured hereafter. I don’t believe in the false ethics of man-made laws. I believe in the rational here and now. And so I have done that for which you and your man-made laws will destroy me. But I am content.”
Koenig turned, faced Spike. His hands were out-flung in a magnificent gesture of surrender. He seemed to grow tall and splendid and his voice had a ring of triumph to it.
“I’ve rescued the happiness of three people. I’ve redressed as best I could the wrong I did when I put a bullet through the heart of David Ealing in a French dugout fifteen years ago.
“I’m your murderer. I’m a murderer many times over. I’ve murdered hundreds and thousands. And each time I’ve sown desolation and tragedy. Each time—except the last two. Take me! Destroy me! You can’t hurt me now!”
CHAPTER XXXIII - Just Nosey
THE LATE AFTERNOON sun slanted over the little garden at the rear of the apartment, shining through the white sprays of syringa, dappling the grass with light and shade. It was like a tiny oasis in a desert of brick and mortar and steel.
Spike stood in the doorway, looking out over its incongruous greenness. It was very still. He could feel the agitated beatings of his own heart. Within there surged a strange mixture of emotions. He could almost hear as if repeated by an echo that cry of triumph and surrender. “Take me! Destroy me! You can’t hurt me now!”
For a long time he stood looking out into the garden. Then presently he turned. Koenig stood beside the table, staring into the black, empty fireplace. He seemed shrunken, crumpled. At last Spike broke the silence.
“A clever scheme, Koenig, damnably clever.” There was something almost of admiration in his voice. “But not quite clever enough. You fooled me for a long time, but not quite long enough. You ha d me guessing, but not—”
Koenig held up his hand for silence. The hand trembled slightly. “Please,” he said. His voice was low and very hoarse. “If there are any questions— you would like to ask—I will answer them—but, please—no gloating—”
“Why shouldn’t I gloat?” Spike put in impatiently. “I beat you at your own game, Koenig, and a damnably clever game it was. And it would have worked too if Linda Crossley hadn’t thrown a monkey wrench into the works.”
As the girl’s name was mentioned, Koenig turned suddenly, faced Spike.
“You do not think after all I have told you that she had anything to do with—”
“No, no. Don’t worry about that. I know she’s innocent. I’ll tell you here and now that Linda Crossley has been at my house on Sark Island every minute until last Saturday morning when she left and went straight to Fairleigh’s office and then to West Albion. But you didn’t know that. And you didn’t know that I was hep t
o you a long time ago. I was hep to you but I didn’t have any proof. And then you murdered Mrs. Ealing and I got an idea. An idea I thought would force your hand.
“I fixed it up with my man Pug to pull a big lie on you, to make you think that Linda had left early the morning Mrs. Ealing was killed. I wanted to make you think that there was a possibility that suspicion would be thrown on her for the Ealing murder, too. I thought if I aroused your fears enough on her behalf, you’d break down and confess. But you didn’t.
“You did a great piece of acting that night, Koenig. For a while you had me wondering if after all my hunch was right. You were still playing a careful, wily game. So I had to resort to more strategy.”
Spike was excited now, pacing up and down the room, his hair a little wild.
“So I had you up to my place a second night for dinner. Remember? And I pulled a second fake on you—that telephone call that was supposedly from Maysie Ealing. Well, that was my man, Pug, again. I’ll confess that I didn’t at that time see to quite what extent your cleverness would take you. I thought you’d go to Maysie Ealing’s, find out Linda wasn’t there and then come rushing back to my place. I was prepared to tell you some more lies. I was even going to tell you there was a warrant out for her arrest. I thought surely that would bring you around.
“But you were smart—at least you thought you were smart. It would have been smart too, if Linda Crossley really had been at Maysie Ealing’s. Sticking one of those stamps in your own watch crystal and then winging yourself at midnight in the Park. A superficial flesh wound, so that you had strength enough before you fainted from loss of blood to sling the gun out into the middle of Central Park lake.
“And that letter beforehand to Linda just in case… Oh, your whole scheme of a self-inflicted wound was clever. But it was your undoing, Koenig, your undoing. With you safe under the covers in the hospital I had a chance I’d been waiting for for a long time. A chance at your shoes, those funny, clumsy, peasant shoes. I slipped ’em out of the locker where they were kept in the hospital and I brought them home with me and went to work on them, and finally I found that very ingenious little hollowed-out space in the left heel, and in there the three remaining stamps from the Crossley collection.
A Most Immoral Murder Page 19