* * * *
I wasn’t back from overseas one day when I discovered I was the only one who had an idea that Myshkin was losing his mind. That’s something I wouldn’t say about my worst enemy—not often, anyway—and Andrey Myshkin was my best friend.
Take the way he didn’t meet me at the station. I’d re-enlisted and been overseas with the Air Force as a meteorological officer for twenty-two months, and I’d written Myshkin almost every week, but the last few months he’d hardly ever answered. When he did knock off a few lines, half the time I couldn’t understand his scribbling. All I could gather was that he was working on an invention and I figured he had plenty to do without sending me greetings. But then, when they flew me home and I telephoned him from Washington the night before I was discharged, things started being a little different from what I’d expected.
Not that I caught it right off. When the operator told me Myshkin’s number had been changed, I didn’t think anything of it. And when I spoke to Myshkin, he sounded confused—but outside of asking how he was and how things were, and saying I was glad to be back, I was hard up for conversation myself. I told Myshkin what train I’d make and he said he’d meet it. My train pulled in on time at 12:38, and by two o’clock—after I’d kept phoning and got no answer—I figured there must be a good reason for his not showing up.
So I put my stuff in a cab and went up to East 52nd, where Myshkin and I had shared an apartment before the draft snatched me. All the way there I kept wondering if he’d left my name on the row of bells in the foyer downstairs, and I knew it would give me a bang if it was still there.
It wasn’t, and neither was Myshkin’s. The card in the slide for apartment 4D said: Miss Harriet Hopper.
I talked to the elevator boy. He was new, but he didn’t remember any Mr. Andrey Myshkin living in the house in the three months he’d been there. The porter might’ve known, but this was a Saturday and he’d quit at noon. The superintendent lived two houses away, but he’d gone uptown to the Columbia game. Yes, there was a photographer in the house—Miss Hopper, in 4D. He thought she was in, and for half a buck he went up to tell her I wanted to see her and what about. It was all right and he took me up.
The door to 4D was open, and Miss Harriet Hopper was standing in the doorway, waiting for me. It was sunshine and spring flowers, the way she stood there and smiled at me.
I wanted to bite her, but instead I shook hands with her and she asked me in. Right off, I saw that a lot of our furniture was gone, and what was left had been moved, but I could have followed her blindfolded just by inhaling the delicate perfume that trailed after her.
* * * *
My story didn’t take long. When I finished, she offered me a smoke and didn’t say anything until we’d both had a few drags, and meanwhile we traded once-overs until she quit.
“Didn’t you write him, lieutenant?” she asked.
“Certainly,” I said. “He never wrote he was moving, and he was getting my letters or they’d have come back.”
She rose from her chair and I followed her legs as she crossed the room to a desk. “You mind if I ask how long you’ve been living here, Miss Hopper?”
“Almost four months.” She opened the desk and brought back a folded legal-looking paper. “I sub-let the apartment from Mr. Myshkin. This is my lease.”
“I don’t have to look at it,” I said. “I believe you.”
“It doesn’t mention you at all, lieutenant.”
“Why should it?” I said. “Myshkin has my power of attorney, and anything he does, I approve. The important thing is that you know him. Can you tell me where he moved?”
“The important thing, lieutenant,” she said politely, “is that I don’t know you.”
I almost swallowed the cigarette.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That wasn’t very nice of me, was it? Frankly, Mr. Myshkin hasn’t told me where he lives, but he has asked me not to give out any information about him.”
“What?” I said. She knew I didn’t believe her and wasn’t trying to hide it. “They gave me his new number when I called,” I said.
“Then why don’t you try him again? The phone’s been moved—it’s just inside the darkroom there. Please, won’t you?” She led the way to the room Myshkin had used as his darkroom, opened the door for me and walked away. “Possibly,” she threw over her shoulder, “the chief operator would give you his address if you explained.”
I dialed the old number, got the new one and tried it. There was no answer. I talked to the chief operator and the supervisor and struck out. I put the phone back, told Miss Hopper I’d be right back, and went out and rang for the elevator. I’d left my stuff downstairs with the boy. I got it and brought it up. Then, without really knowing why, but partly because something went bzzzz! in my head, instead of ringing the doorbell, I tried my old key in the lock. Of course it didn’t fit, and while I was still monkeying with it, Miss Hopper opened the door.
“I changed the lock some time ago,” she said.
“Please don’t leap to any conclusions,” I said.
“I’d crawl away from the conclusions I’ve made!” she said, her eyes stabbing me. “A fine soldier you are! If you’re a soldier! No wonder you looked familiar—I’ve probably seen your picture on post office bulletins!”
“Please, Miss Hopper!” I said. “After all…” Then I walked right in past her, put my stuff down in the center of the living room, and began taking out some of the dross I’d collected in my official travels.
Miss Hopper followed me in. “What are you doing there?” she demanded. “If you don’t get out right now—”
“You’ll call the police,” I said. “The police, do you hear?”
“You won’t stop me!” she cried. “You wouldn’t dare!”
“Miss Hopper, you’re so darned pretty!” I said.
“You’re after him! I knew it the moment I saw you!” she cried. “Poor Mr. Myshkin. But it won’t do any good! I swear it! You can torture me and I won’t say a single word!”
“You’re a brave girl!” I said, getting up. I’d found half a few letters from Myshkin and some group snapshots that included both of us. I got out the folder with my discharge and my last orders and tried to give it to Miss Hopper.
She ducked around a chair and stayed there, waltzing around nervously. “Put it down!” she said, brushing back her very light blonde hair. “Just put it down on this chair.”
I put it down and backed off. “Read it,” I said. “Do me that favor.”
“Promise—”
“Promised, Miss Hopper. Before you asked.”
She went through it thoroughly, comparing me to every one of the snapshots, comparing various signatures, serial numbers and dates, and even held some of the stuff against the light. Then she looked up at me and the corners of her mouth curved a little, as if she wanted to smile but wondered how I’d take it.
“Miss Hopper, must beautiful women be stupid?” I said.
“Thank you,” she murmured. “Then you’re not angry?”
“Henry Bannerman angry with you? Not even annoyed—just mixed up. All I want to know is where is Myshkin. Do you know?”
“Yes,” she nodded.
“You’ll tell me?”
“I—I think so. No, please don’t say anything—not until I explain. You see, Mr. Myshkin doesn’t know that I know, and I think he’d be terribly upset if he did. I found out by accident—he dropped a postcard addressed to him when he was here one night. It was just an ad from a radio supply house. He didn’t seem to miss it and I didn’t mention it because it was just about then, oh, maybe two months ago, that he began acting so mysteriously.”
“Myshkin?” I said. “Mysteriously?”
“Well,” she hesitated, “he seemed so… so furtive and… and troubled…” She gave it up with a little shrug. “Oh, you k
now how he is, even ordinarily.”
“Let’s not take anything for granted,” I said. “How is he?”
“Wouldn’t you agree he’s—well, eccentric?”
“Eccentric?”
She smiled politely. “You know, people disagree about those things. I really don’t know him very well.”
I shook my head. “I don’t get it. You’d have to know him pretty well to think he’s eccentric. Of course, he drinks Slivovitz and beer, and he makes surrealist movies, and he likes to play with color wheels—but that’s not what you mean,” I said, “is it?”
“I’m really not sure what I mean,” she said.
“You said he comes here?” I said.
“He’s been here several times. He comes for the rent and to copy some of the things he left on the walls in the darkroom. He asked me not paint the darkroom. He asked me not to paint over them until he’s through.”
“On the walls?” I asked.
“Please.”
I followed her to the darkroom. She opened the door and turned on an overhead light. Myshkin’s cabinets and shelves and work tables were still there, but the equipment was new to me. Two walls were freshly-painted ivory, but the other two, meeting in the corner where Myshkin’s enlarger had stood, were the same old seasick green. The green walls were just about covered with notes and figures and diagrams. I didn’t even try to work them out. They’d been put down with pencil, ink, crayon—as if the writer had grabbed anything handy.
“Miss Hopper, this really beats me,” I said. “Myshkin was no wall-writer when I lived with him, but that’s his handwriting. Is this what he comes to copy?”
“It’s the only logical conclusion,” she said. “He goes in here by himself and he closes the door. Sometimes he stays a minute or two, but once he stayed more than an hour. What else would he do in here? Siphon my hypo or something? Why doesn’t he want these two walls painted? There wasn’t anything on the others.”
“Now tell me he copies the stuff in the dark,” I said.
She laughed with me as we went back to the living room, but she said, “Maybe he does. I hear him switch on the light after he goes in and before he comes out, but maybe he unscrews the bulb,” and she laughed again.
“I have a feeling you half mean that,” I said.
“Well, ten per cent, anyway. Would you like a drink?”
“You talked me into it,” I said. “Some of this might make sense after a drink.”
So we had two or three drinks. She asked me about the army and I told her she was among the first half dozen pretty girls I’d seen since I got back, and she said the way I looked at her sometimes, she’d thought she was the very first. I tried Myshkin’s number again and did no better. When I got ready to leave, she showed me the postcard Myshkin had dropped. It was from a downtown radio supply house, and the address looked as if it had been stenciled by one of those machines that run off mailing lists of regular customers. I decided not to ask myself what Myshkin was doing with radio supplies and felt much better. The address was: 22 Force Tube Avenue, in Manhattan, and I had no idea where it was.
“It’s downtown, just outside the west border of the Village,” Miss Hopper said. “It’s near the waterfront, and the whole street’s a single block long, and nobody knows it exists or what its name means. Anyway, nobody I’ve asked.”
“What’s the place itself like?”
“I don’t know. I never went.”
“Then how—”
“Oh, I happened to be looking at a map of the city streets and I looked it up. Poor Mr. Myshkin, he’s so thin and haggard I sometimes feel like—”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Who’s thin and haggard?”
“What a queer question!” she said.
“I got a feeling the answer’s even queerer,” I said. “Did you say Myshkin was thin and haggard?”
“You heard me say so,” she said. “What’s so odd about that?”
“You know,” I said, “I’ve had a feeling something was wrong ever since I got here.”
“Goodness,” she said. “You sound just like Batman.”
“I happen to be a junior G-man,” I said. “The last time I saw my friend Myshkin, he weighed a slow two hundred and fifty pounds.”
“Well, he must have been worrying since then,” she said. “The Mr. Andrey Myshkin I know is thin and haggard. And if you’re such a good friend of his, why don’t you ever refer to him by his first name?”
“Who, Myshkin?”
“Yes, Andrey.”
“You know him that well?”
“I said I didn’t!”
“Everybody calls him Myshkin,” I said. “That’s the kind he is. All right. What made you keep the card?”
“Look here, you! If—”
“Please,” I said, holding up a hand. “I am a troubled man. Why did you keep the card?”
She looked at me quizzically, then she said, “Because it seemed like a good idea to know where I could find my landlord if I needed him for anything important.”
“Am I important?”
“Important in what way?”
“Important to you, Miss Hopper,” I said. “Does my nearness thrill you? Think before you answer, but please say yes, Miss Hopper. I am madly in love with you and would carry you off now, if I weren’t sure that you are implicated in the murder of my friend Myshkin. Still, on the chance that you aren’t, will you have dinner with me one night soon?”
“What happens to girls who say no?”
“Their bodies are discovered in the river.”
“Then I’ll be one of the yesses,” she said.
“Good,” I said. “Those don’t even get discovered.”
“Call me and let me know what happens?”
“You bet,” I said.
* * * *
I had some trouble with a cab driver because we couldn’t find Force Tube Avenue, but we found it. It was one block long. It has some big warehouses and loading platforms, a few lots with half their fences gone, a fruit line’s pier at the far end, and number 22. It had no number on it, but it was the only building on the block that might have had someone living in it—if, for some reason, anyone would want to.
It was a sad old red-brick house, one story high. Most of the ground floor was taken up by a large arch-shaped wooden door that had once been painted green. The sidewalk in front of it sloped to the gutter and was paved with small cobblestones, and from that and the large door, I guessed there had once been a small stable or maybe a blacksmith’s shop there. To its left there was a narrow wooden door with a brick step before it and grass growing around the brick. On one of the doorposts there was a rusty mailbox and an old-fashioned door-pull. There wasn’t any name on either of them.
I yanked the pull and stepped back. The street was empty and quiet, but I could hear voices and machinery from the pier. The sun was warm and there were gulls in the sky.
There were two big windows in the upper story, both completely covered with black shades. I yanked the pull again a few times and listened at the door.
Suddenly it opened and there stood Myshkin. Don’t ask me how I recognized him. He was unquestionably thin and haggard. He stood in his socks, wearing trousers much too big for him, and an undershirt. He hadn’t shaved in days and his thick black hair looked wild. He stared at me with bloodshot eyes that were full of sleep. Then all at once his worn-out face looked happy and he grabbed my hand. “It’s Henry! It’s really Henry!” he cried. “Come in! Come in! Damn it, what time is it? Don’t stand there!”
He was shivering and I went in quickly. When I closed the door behind me, everything was pitch dark inside, but Myshkin kept pumping my hand as he led me up a slanting flight of wooden stairs to a large room upstairs. “Three-thirty?” he kept saying. “What? How could that be? I set my clock. That’s terrible,
not meeting you. Three-thirty? I can’t understand it, on my word.”
“It’s all right, Myshkin,” I said. “You look tired.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Myshkin. “Sit down. Smoke. Talk.”
We lit cigarettes and he went to let the window shades up halfway, still jabbering. I took a quick look around the place. It had a few beat-out pieces of furniture, a rusty sink, a grimy gas range, an open bathroom (the door hung askew on one hinge) with a tiny tub, and two rear windows that were covered with black tar-paper. Up front, most of the room was taken up by a huge, new-looking, unpainted wooden work table that ran around three walls. It was littered with electronic tubes and dials and odd delicate bits of machinery, as if somebody had been disemboweling cameras and radios and who knows what else just for the hell of it. Over the table there were three continuous stepped shelves that overflowed with vats, jars, cans, cartons and boxes. Near me there was an unmade studio bed with a torn sheet and naked pillow. More pillows were piled in a chair, half burying a telephone and an alarm clock.
I pointed to the pillows. “Maybe that’s why you didn’t hear the clock or the telephone,” I said. “Myshkin, I never saw you look so tired.”
“I just wanted a nap,” he said, coming back and tossing the pillows on the bed. “I’m ashamed, you waiting there, Henry. How many times did you ring? You rang this number, didn’t you? Sure, the operator would give—”
He broke off abruptly, let the last pillow drop back on the chair and looked at me. “How did you know I lived here?” he asked.
“Military intelligence,” I said.
“How did you know?” he asked again, and his voice dried out and caught in his throat. He sounded badly frightened and his eyes gleamed a dull smoky orange like a cat’s. He didn’t give me a chance to answer. “Who sent you?” he said in a crazy, croaking whisper.
The Mad Scientist Megapack Page 2