The Hunter and Other Stories

by Dashiell Hammett

  “Good gracious, Mr. Kipp!” Miss Propson’s syllables clicked as monotonously from between her thin lips as the keys of her typewriter clicked under her thin fingers. “Don’t you think we should have some ventilation?”

  From their desks farther away Eells and Bowne looked up with annoyance, and the rustling of papers in the chief clerk’s hands stopped.

  “A little fresh air won’t kill you,” Harry Terns said.

  Just as this window was beside Kipp’s desk, there were windows beside Eells and the chief clerk, and they were closed. But Kipp did not denounce the manifest injustice of this; he capitulated before the unanimity of his colaborers’ protests, and disposed his two paperweights, a box of pins, a metal ruler, and an extra inkwell so that his papers were not blown around enough to prevent his working.

  An hour passed, and a harsh buzzing broke out: the signal that summoned Kipp to his employer’s office. Lucian Dovenmichle was fat beyond the fatness that gives a body many curves. His curves were few, but gigantic in sweep. Kipp came softly into this mountainous presence.

  “Finish the National accounts?” The Dovenmichle voice was fat with a husky pinguidness.

  “Yes, sir. That is, the recapitulation will be ready by noon.”

  “All right.”

  Then, Kipp’s hand on the door-knob.

  “My shoe-lace is undone. Can’t tie it with all these damned clothes on. Tie it, will you?”

  Kipp bent deferentially over the Dovenmichle foot—a leather-enveloped thing as large as a healthy baby—and tugged at the ends of the inadequate black strings. The Dovenmichle leg jerked in what was nearly a kick.

  “Damn it, Kipp, are you trying to choke me?”

  Kipp got the lace knotted in place and went back to his desk.

  With eleven o’clock, this being the fifteenth of the month, came the chief clerk with Kipp’s salary. After that Kipp worked erratically, with a trembling of the pen in his fingers, a feverish lip-licking trick of tongue, and a careless spattering of ink about the mouth of his inkwell. When the noon gong sounded he was the first man through the Dovenmichle door.

  Ignoring the establishment where he usually ate, he plunged through the mid-block traffic to where a barber’s sign revolved brilliantly against a white building front.

  Very leisurely—while four barbers stood at attention behind their chairs and a negro held ready hands for each garment—Kipp removed his coat, his vest, his collar and tie, and last of all his hat. His face now was not the one with which his familiars were acquainted. His jaw had advanced, his lips had reared up, his sallow skin had acquired pinkness, his shoulders were almost straight, and what chest had survived twenty years of crouching over desks did its best to arch. The unhurried disrobing completed, he turned—very deliberately—and strutted to the farthest vacant chair.

  “Fairly close. Not too high with the clippers.”

  His voice achieved depth with unostentatious authority. The first Napoleon, ordering a brigade or two of dragoons forward, may have spoken thus.

  A nod summoned a bootblack. Another a manicure. With two men and a woman hovering attentively, obsequiously, over his head, his feet, his hands, Elmer Kipp sat looking with rapt eyes at the picture he made in the wall mirror opposite.

  M A G I C

  It was late on the ninth day of Straït’s fasting that Simon, his talmid, brought the jeweler Buclip into the room where the magician sat reading a tattered manuscript titled, adequately enough, The Black Pullet, or the Hen with the Golden Eggs, comprising the Science of Magic Talismans and Rings, the Art of Necromancy and of the Kabalah, for the Conjuration of Ærial and Infernal Spirits, of Sylphs, Undines and Gnomes, serviceable for the acquisition of the Secret Sciences, for the Discovery of Treasures, for obtaining power to command all beings and to unmask all Sciences and Bewitchments. The whole following the Doctrines of Socrates, Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Son of the Grand Aromasis, and other philosophers whose works in MS escaped the conflagration of the Library of Ptolemy. Translated from the Language of the Magi and that of the Hieroglyphs by the Doctors Mizzaboula-Jabamı¯a, Danhuzerus, Judahim and Eliaeb.

  The room was large, white-floored, its tall walls hidden behind dark velvet glitteringly embroidered with occult insignia. In a corner the boy who had not yet got back the speech lost in awe at being apprenticed to the magician, some two months ago, squatted on his heels, and with a rumpled square of silk polished the silver ring of Raum, graved with his seal that was like the deck-plan of an eccentric small boat.

  Straït was a plump man who may have been forty years old, though with magicians you cannot tell. His shrewd face was transparent of skin and sagging of mouth-corner, for this was the ninth day of his fasting. When he marked his place with a clean pudgy finger and raised his face to Simon, a reversed five-pointed star in a Hebraic-legended circle on the velvet behind him made a gay nimbus for his round pink head.

  For a fidgeting moment the jeweler Buclip tried to catch the magician’s gaze, then he too looked at Simon, waiting for him to speak. But when the talmid would have spoken Buclip burst into sudden babblement.

  “It’s— I want— If you can—I know you can,” he tumbled his incoherence at the magician, “if you will. I want—” His words degenerated further into unintelligible low sounds directed at the limp hat his hands worried.

  Above these low sounds Simon said, “He wants the love of a woman, Master.”

  The jeweler Buclip shuffled his feet and cracked his knuckles and looked at nothing, but he nodded manfully. He was a large nervous man whose naked head was as grey as grey hair could have made it.

  “An especial woman?” Straït’s brown eyes that were tired from abstinence turned to the jeweler for the first time. “Or any woman?”

  Buclip shook his head until his collar creaked.

  “An especial one!”

  “Is she wife or maid?”

  “Mai— She is not married.”

  “And there’s no trinket in your shop to catch her with?”

  “I’ve got the finest stock in the city!” The jeweler’s mercantile glibness died with a gulp in his burly throat. “My gifts don’t seem to make her any more—don’t seem to give her any more—” Anxiety succeeded shame between the grey pads encompassing his eyes. “You’ll help me? You’ll help me again?”

  Elbows on table beside the manuscript of The Black Pullet, face in hands, Straït rolled flaccid cheeks in cushioned palms and made the jeweler wait while the only sound in the room was the whisper of silk to silver in the hands of the squatting boy.

  “You shall have her,” the magician said when the jeweler’s twisting fingers had spotted his hat with damp prints. “You will tell Simon what we need to know.”

  Buclip stepped jubilantly forward.

  “You will—?”

  Simon caught his arm, sh-h-hed in his ear, led him out.

  “Always,” said Straït, leaning back in his chair, when the talmid had returned to put a handful of gold coins and a written paper beside his master. “Always,” Straït the magician complained when he had swept them over the edge into an open drawer, “it is love and wealth they want, no matter which variety of those things may be popular for a while. Twice perhaps in twenty years I have been asked for wisdom, twice it may be for happiness, once I can remember for beauty. For the rest, come fad, go fashion, there is love and there is wealth. Train your mountebankery on those targets, my Simon, and you need never want clients.”

  “Mountebankery?”

  “Charlatanism.”

  The talmid chewed his red mouth and fear harassed his eyebrows crookedly.

  “I will not get beyond that?”

  When Straït had shaken his head, muscles writhed dismally in the talmid’s white young face, and the working of his mouth was out of all proportion to the volume of sound that came out, but he held his master’s gaze, however forlornly.

  “I am too stupid, then,” he achieved, “to really learn the Art?”

  Straït
puffed his cheeks out, blew them empty, and reproached his pupil.

  “Tch! Tch! What I meant was I have nothing else to teach.”

  “Master! The things you do!”

  “Yes,” Straït confessed with an indifferent shrug. “I grant you the queer monsters riding wolves I bring out of nowhere or Hell, as the case may be, and the wolves riding queerer monsters, and the bulls with men’s heads, and the men with snakes’ heads. I grant you all those, if they mean anything. What with all the nonsense I go through, what with fasting and poring over weird rituals and smelling unlikely odors, what with confusing my eyes with intricate symbols and chanting complicated conjurations, wouldn’t it be funny, Simon, if I didn’t see the things, however monstrous, I point my bewildered mind at?”

  Simon was respectful, but Simon was triumphant.

  “But I have seen those things too, Master, and the boy!”

  “You have?” The magician’s tired brown eyes taunted the talmid with his youth. “And why shouldn’t you? Because I am a mountebank must I be an altogether incompetent one? Is it so great a trick to make you see and hear and smell phantasmata? Must I be less adept than politicians and recruiting sergeants and the greenest of girls?”

  Simon, thus taken in conceit, flushed and looked down. Nevertheless he shook his head confidently.

  “But the things you have done! The Wengel girl, the General, Madame Reer! And all the others, and all the things you have done for them!”

  Straït snorted at the idea that the authenticity of his work was to be measured by its consequences.

  “Equal results, far greater results,” he pointed out, “have been achieved by wizards whose methods were the nadir of idiocy. Indubitable marvels have been worked at one time or another by means of almost anything you can name, so long as it was a thing offensive or ridiculous enough of itself. Guts of a sort or another have more than held their own in the long run, of course, but there are few things in our world that have not had their goetical properties soon or late.”

  He leaned forward to tap with derisive finger the tattered manuscript of The Black Pullet.

  “This childish hocuspocus, whose fraudulent absurdities are known even to men who write books—haven’t magicians used it successfully? Haven’t such asinine formulas as the Grimoire of Honorius, the Verus Jesuitarum Libellus, and the Praxis Magica Fausti been effectively applied to the disarrangements of natural things’ balance? Haven’t simpler sorcerers perpetrated like wonders without any tools at all?”

  “Yes, Master,” Simon said, tight-lipped, his back to the wall of his faith, “but you have shown me things that could not be unless a true magic was behind them.”

  Straït put his face in his hands and fell to rolling his cheeks in his palms again. A wistfulness was behind the tired shrewdness of his pink face, perhaps because he could not now contradict his talmid.

  “There is that thing in back of these things, Simon, in back of our toying, behind even the explorations of the elder cabalists. That thing, almost corporate, perhaps, in the knowledge and experience of the Magi’s sanctuaries in the distant years, is a wisdom, a mystic science of knowledge behind and beyond and above known knowledge. It hasn’t, it can’t have anything to do with our trickeries, our juggling. All this”—he flicked a hand from his cheek to indicate the room and its appointments and everything that had happened or could happen in the room, and in the world because of the room—“is a twisted false shadow of that thing’s possible shadow. And because that thing is almost certainly back there, this theurgic sleight-of-hand of ours would be all the more shabby for being valid.

  “On a day, Simon, perhaps you will go through this playing to a perception of that thing in back. But it is not likely. What is likely is you’ll try and fail and fall back into this legerdemain in which you daily gain facility. Maybe you’ll try again, but it is not likely anything will come of it. In this nonsense you’ve learned you’ll find the satisfaction a man has in doing what—however silly—he can do skillfully. There will be days when you’ll find a pleasure in the thought of things you have done for your clients, though that will come only on optimistic days. You’ll have the flavor of your power over our thin Procels and Hagentis, and of your romantic, even important, place in your world. Intelligent people will have small use for you, true enough, knowing your work is as futile when it succeeds as when it fails. But that won’t worry you greatly: the intelligent won’t be, really, citizens of your world.

  “You’ll have your skill, and your craftsman’s pride in that skill, and the money it brings you, and presently you will be middle-aged and old. Some nights the thought of the True Magic you mock with your trickery will be a torment in your bed, but, in the end, your brain addled by fasting, by immersion in symbolism and formula, and by the rest of the business, you will become—as I hope—a simple-minded sorcerer with childish pride and faith in your utility.”

  “Yes, Master.” A pleasantly indifferent smile colored the talmid’s face. “Just the same, I’ll be perfectly satisfied if I can ever do half the things you do.”

  Straït looked at his talmid with eyes wherein pity and amused contempt and a certain pleasure in the compliment were curiously blended. He grunted away the matter so unsatisfactorily discussed and turned to the immediate.

  “I can’t use Raum for this Buclip business, though he would have served nicely for the other,” he said. “But, since I can raise one demon to handle both, there’s no need of fasting another nine days. What we need, then, is one who is a reader of minds and a reconciler for the one, and a kindler of love for the other. There is Vaul, the camel, agreeable enough if it were not for his persistence in talking Egyptian, a devilishly confusing language for me. Dantalian would be best, I think, especially as the morning should be fair.” He spoke to the boy who still rubbed Raum’s ring. “Put up that ring, my son, and look to Dantalian’s. You will find it near the top of the cabinet, a copper ring with a sprawling seal of crosses and small circles.”

  The morning’s dawning, fair as the magician had foretold, was barely accomplished when, white and large in linen cap and robe, belted with the broad skin girdle that was marked with the Names, Straït came into the room where his assistants were in their proper garments. When he gave them good-morning they answered with nods only: they might not speak until the business was done. From the open west windows the velvet hangings had already been gathered back, and the four candles—the red, the white, the green, and the greenish black—stood on the table beside the silken roll in which the tools of the Art were bundled.

  When he had seen that these things were ready, Straït drew on the white floor, still damp from the lustral water, a wide circle, and, within it, another, less wide. Into the space between the circles he copied, to the rhythm of an inarticulate mumbled chant, and writing always toward the west, the Names that were on his girdle, spacing them with the astrological signs of sun, moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. In the inner circle’s centre he drew a square whose angles terminated in crosses. Between that square and the circle he drew four five-pointed stars. In the centre of each he put the Tau, and, in the proper places, the proper letters. Outside the circle, close to its curve, he repeated the astrological signs, and, in the prescribed places, the four five-pointed stars with their centred Taus, but in each point of these stars he wrote a syllable of the Name Tetragrammaton. Last of all, he drew a triangle that lay partly outside the circle and partly over its western rim.

  All this while Straït’s chant had purred oppressively out of his throat to hang heavily about him, so that, by the time he had finished his mystic architecture and had gone to the table to unroll the silken bundle, the room’s atmosphere was thick, repressive of movement: the talmid, carrying the brazier of virgin charcoal into the triangle, moved sluggishly, and the dumb boy’s hands, setting the candles in the stars that were outside the circle, moved clumsily, stiffly, as if they needed the eyes’ help to tell when they held the candles and when not. When t
he candles and the charcoal in the brazier had been lighted, Straït took the hazel rod inscribed Tetragrammaton and the sword whose legend was Elohim Gibor from the table and stepped into the circle’s square. At their master’s heels, one holding each of the lesser swords with their lesser legends—Panoraim Heamesin and Gamorin Debalin—Simon and the boy knelt.

  Straït planted his feet firmly apart, looked to Dantalian’s ring on his left hand that its bezel was out, shrugged his shoulders for greater ease under the heavy robe, hitched his girdle, freshened his grip on rod and sword, cleared his throat, and lifted his face to the west.

  “I invoke and conjure you, O Spirit Dantalian, and, fortified with the power of the Supreme Majesty, I command you by Baralamensis, Baldachiensis, Paumachie, Apoloresedes and the most potent princes Genio, Liachide, ministers of the Tartarean Seat, chief princes of the Seat of Apologia in the ninth region; I exorcise and command you, O Spirit Dantalian, by Him Who Spake and it was done, by the most holy and glorious Names Adonai, El, Elohim, Elohe, Zebaoth, Elion, Escherce, Jah, Tetragrammaton, Sadai: do you forthwith appear and show yourself to me, here before this circle, in a fair and human shape, without any deformity or horror; do you come forthwith, from whatever part of the world, and make rational answers to my questions; come presently, come visibly, come affably, manifest that which I desire, being conjured by the Name. . . .”

  And so, on and on, the mystic rigmarole rose and fell in carefully cadenced strain, on through its tedious length, now contradictory, now tautological, now repetitious, but not ever in its emptiest phrase to be escaped. When it was done, except for the more rosy light of fuller risen sun, there was nothing in the room that had not been there before.

  “Um-hmmm,” Straït hummed briefly. “We shall see.”

  And he swung into the second conjuration, less restraint in his voice, loosing a gong-like resonance in his broader vowels. He called now on the Name Anehexeton which Aaron spoke and was made wise, the Name Joth that Jacob learned, the Name Escerchie Ariston which Moses named and the rivers and waters of Egypt were turned into blood, and others. And when he was done there was a vague flickering between brazier and window, a distortion of the air that was gone as soon as it was come.