The dream detective: being some account of the methods of Moris Klaw

by Sax Rohmer; Internet Archive

  "Good morning, Mr. Searles," came his rumbling greeting over the wires; "it is very wet again. This

  appalling English climate becomes disastrous. I have lost in one week two marmosets and a Peruvian squirrel. They see the fog and rain, they sneeze, they cough, they die. I have to make to you a request, Mr. Searles: it is that you secure for myself and Isis the invitation to Mr. Len Hassett's party at his new studio."

  "Certainly, Mr. Klaw," I replied, trying to keep a note of surprise from my voice; "Hassett and I are old friends. I have only to mention your name and you will be heartily welcomed."

  That Isis would be welcome I did not doubt, but, mentally picturing the eccentric figure of Moris Klaw at such a gathering, I could not deny that it seemed out of place. However, I doubted not that some purpose deeper than amusement underlay the request, and the matter was arranged accordingly.

  Moris Klaw called for me in a Daimler, wherein, queenly, Isis reclined in an ermine cloak. I think I had never before become so fully conscious of the mystery enshrouding the life of this oddly assorted pair as I did during that drive to Chelsea.

  Who, I asked myself, was Moris Klaw, the inscrutable genius who so gladly offered his services to the guardians of law and order?—who dealt in beasts and birds and reptiles, old furniture and fusty books?—who lived in one of the most unsavoury quarters of London?—whose daughter was an unchallenged beauty, possessed of clothes and jewels

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  which never were purchased out of the profits of the Wapping business ? My reflections, however, availed me nothing.

  Arrived at Chelsea, we met our host in the lounge hall of the house, and, introductions being over and the beauty of Isis having annoyed every other pretty woman in the place, I presently found myself escorting Morris Klaw's daughter through the garden to the studio, whither some of the party had preceded us. We paused for a moment and looked in at the window.

  A group of a dozen people or so gathered around the piano at the farther end of the place; but, nearer to us, seated in a high armchair before the blazing fire and caressing a black cat which rested upon his knee, was a strange-looking, gaunt-faced man. Upon his harsh features the dancing firelight painted odd shadows, so that at one moment it was a smiling, benevolent face, and, in the next, the face of a devil.

  It was a mere illusion, of course, but when I turned again to Isis and we proceeded toward the door, I saw her biting her lip in sudden agitation, and:

  "What is the matter?" I asked.

  "Nothing," she replied—"but what a queer-looking man that was sitting before the fire."

  Presently we met him, however, as well as the black cat (which proved to belong to Len Hassett). He was Serg Skobolov, a Russian pianist whose reputation was growing by leaps and bounds. Upon

  Isis his curious small eyes rested greedily; and that she was repelled, the girl was unable to disguise. In due course, when the merriment was in full swing, there were songs, and a certain amount of dancing took place; and then melting at the right moment to the entreaties of Hassett, Skobolov agreed to play.

  "You know," said a lady journalist who was sitting on the floor near me, "Skobolov has composed numerous works but not one of them is published."

  "Ah!" came a hoarse whisper. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Moris Klaw standing in the shadow behind us. "How strange! Does he refuse then to publish his compositions?"

  "Absolutely," the lady declared earnestly. "He maintains that no one else could play them."

  "Is that so?" wheezed Moris Klaw. "Perhaps he is right. Presently we shall hear and judge for ourselves."

  He became silent, as the pianist, seating himself, began to speak:

  "Ladies and gentlemen," he said in his broken English, "you know that the friend of us all, our good Hassett, takes this studio because it is haunted. Here, murder is done, yes, and so I shall play to you a prelude newly composed in which—it is appropriate—I try to express in music the lust of slaying."

  He paused amid an uncomfortable silence, and then:

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  "Some of you must know," he resumed, "that all my compositions are emotions, attempts to paint in chords things experienced. Some experiences one cannot have and so can never paint—for atmosphere, atmosphere, is everything! Now I shall paint for you the story of this studio."

  With that, he began to play; and although I had never heard him before, I realized from the outset that he was a master of his instrument. Indeed, I thought, a genius. His theme and its treatment alike were unusual, grotesque. There was some quality in the man's technique which I found myself unable to define. He possessed uncanny power. When, at last, the prelude ended, it was greeted by a silence more eloquent than any applause.

  It was only momentary, of course. Then came a wild outburst of enthusiasm. Yet it had been long enough, that moment of stillness, for me to hear the squirting of Moris Klaw's scent spray immediately behind me. And when at last the clapping and shouting died down:

  "That prelude," came his voice, almost in my ear, "it has a bad smell. Soon, Isis my child, we must go. It grows late. But perhaps Mr. Hassett will permit me to telephone to my chauffeur, as I allow him to go away? It is all right? Very well. How wonderful is that prelude."

  Skobolov's attentions to Isis Klaw became very marked. Presently, following some whispered words from her father, I noticed with surprise that she had ceased to avoid the Russian pianist, indeed was consenting to smile upon him. Hence, when presently Moris Klaw's car arrived, I was prepared for Skobo-lov's acceptance of an offer of a lift as far as his hotel.

  For my own part I confess quite frankly that I disliked the man. I had disliked him on sight, and nearer acquaintance did nothing to dispel that first impression. That Isis disliked him, also, I could not doubt. Therefore I divined that she was playing a part, although its purpose defeated my imagination.

  Throughout the drive from Chelsea to the hotel Moris Klaw discussed music, a subject with which I had not hitherto believed him to be acquainted. Perhaps his intention was to exhibit Skobolov's intense egotism, for indeed the man was a monument to his own colossal vanity. His genius I could not dispute, but his personality was detestable.

  I had foreseen that he would try to detain the party at his hotel, or, rather, that he would try to detain Isis. (I had no doubt whatever that he would gladly have excused both Moris Klaw and myself.) But I had not been prepared for Klaw's acceptance

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  of the offer. However, as we descended from the car and I hesitated whether to accept Skobolov's grudging inclusion of myself in the party, or to walk home, I detected an unmistakable expression in Moris Klaw's queer eyes, twinkling behind the pebbles of his pince-nez.

  Suddenly the fact came home to me that I was a minor actor in some mysterious comedy directed by the genius of Wapping Old Stairs.

  The Russian occupied a luxurious suite, and Moris Klaw, with reluctance which I could see to be feigned, agreed at Skobolov's pressing invitation to drink one glass of wine and then to depart for home.

  Skobolov did his best to make himself agreeable, proffering cigars and cigarettes, and opening a bottle of Bollinger. Moris Klaw and I declined to smoke, but Isis accepted a cigarette and lay back in a deep lounge chair blowing smoke rings and watching the vainglorious Russian musician through half-lowered lashes.

  There was a grand piano in the room, and Moris Klaw, who had not touched his wine, prevailed upon Skobolov to play for us once more the prelude which we had heard at Hassett's studio.

  The pianist shrugged, glanced at Isis, and then seated himself at the instrument. Placing his cigarette in a little ashtray, he laid his fingers caressingly on the keyboard, and once more my soul was harrowed by those indescribable strains.

  As the sound of the last chord died away:

  "Good," said Moris Klaw, "excellent, most excellent. And now, please"—he stood up—"I am an old nuisance, an absent old foolish. Do you object t
hat I telephone to my chauffeur? I just remember that Isis leaves her ermine cloak in the car. Is it not so, my child?"

  "Good heavens, yes!" Isis exclaimed.

  He crossed the room to the telephone, circling ungainly around the piano, raised the instrument, and:

  "Will you be pleased to ask Mr. Moris Klaw's chauffeur to bring in from the car the cloak," he said, distinctly. "Yes, all right, very well." He hung up the receiver and turned to face us again, shrugging his shoulders. "So greatly tempting," he explained, "to some prowler thief."

  I now became aware that Isis had suddenly grown very pale. She had stood up and was watching Skobolov intently. He seemed rather to be enjoying the scrutiny of her fine dark eyes—when there came a peremptory rap upon the door.

  "Come in!" said the Russian sharply.

  The door opened—and Detective-Inspector Grimsby stood on the threshold!

  Moris Klaw nodded in Skobolov's direction, and, literally stupefied with astonishment, I heard Grimsby say:

  "Serg Skobolov, I arrest you on a charge of having

  murdered Mr. Pyke Webley at his studio on the night

  of November the fourteenth. I must warn you "

  But he got no further.

  Uttering a sound which I can only describe as the roar of a wild beast, Skobolov leapt upon him, clasped his hands about the speaker's throat, and hurled him to the floor!

  To Moris Klaw, Grimsby owed his life. The Russian was kneeling on the detective's chest and literally squeezing life out of him, when Klaw, surprisingly agile, sprang forward. He stooped over the would-be murderer and performed some simple operation which threw Skobolov upon his back.

  In two seconds the madman was up again; and, even now, I sometimes see in my dreams that devil face, transfigured by such evil as I could not have supposed to reside in any human being. He opened and closed his hands in a horrible, writhing, suggestive movement, looked at Grimsby who was trying slowly, painfully to struggle to his feet, looked at Isis, looked at Moris Klaw, looked at myself. Then, bursting into peals of laughter, he ran to the French windows, threw one open, sprang on to the parapet outside, and uttering one final frenzied shriek, leapt into the courtyard sixty feet below!

  VI

  "Everyone will say," Moris Klaw declared, "'he was a failure, that old fool from Wapping'—for how

  can a dead man confess, and what use for the newspapers to tell the public why this poor Russian leaps from his window?" He shrugged his shoulders, looking around my study. "You say to me," he continued, addressing Grimsby: 'What is the sound you hear when you sleep in the studio?' and I do not tell you because you would not understand. But now I shall tell you. I hear, my friend, a chord in G Minor!

  "Ah! you wag your head. I knew you would wag your head! But beware that your brains do not rattle. This is what I hear, and this is the thing in the mind of the murderer at the moment that he does the murder—a chord in G Minor, Mr. Grimsby! I, the old fool, have the music sense, and this chord it intrigues me. Why? because it is not playable— yet it is a chord upon a piano."

  "Not playable!" Grimsby exclaimed.

  "Not playable, my friend, except by a man having enormous hands! And also, my good Grimsby, the poor Webley could not have been strangled as he was except by one having enormous hands.

  "This is what I first perceive when I see his body, and what for one absurd moment I dream that you have perceived also. I, myself, have large hands, but although I try I cannot span within inches of the marks made upon his throat by the monster who kills him. And so, when I hear this chord, and I question and I try and I find that it cannot be played

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  by any normal hand, I say, 'Yes! it is a musician with abnormal hands!' And I look for him and I listen for him. And to him I have one other clue—a hashish cigarette."

  "What kind of cigarette?" Grimsby muttered.

  "I said hashish, my friend—a cigarette containing the drug Indian hemp; a kind of cigarette very rarely met in England. In that ashtray, among a dozen others, I detect it immediately. Is it not strange"— he turned to me—"how the murderer is drawn to the place of the murder? It is why, when I hear of the house-warming, I plan to go. Perhaps it is accident —perhaps something else.

  "He was a mad genius, that Skobolov. He tries to know supreme emotion that he may write supreme music. Perhaps he succeeds. Who can say? But his compositions cannot live—for no other man can play them, on the piano at any rate. Where did he meet the poor Webley? Who can say? Perhaps they were acquainted, perhaps they met in the street. Webley was Bohemian. He invites Skobolov into the lonely studio. Good! There could be no evidence. It was his opportunity—to know the emotion of murder and to get safe away!

  "To-night I hear it again—the dream chord: I see his great hands. But he smokes no cigarette in the studio, not until he has returned to his own rooms. For this I waited, this last piece of evidence. Behold!"

  From his pocket-case he took out two cigarette stumps.

  "To-night, in the studio, at last I hear again my dream chord—the chord in G, in G Minor; yet when I telephone to you, my good Grimsby, you think I am the old fool. I say, 'Hurry to Chelsea. I await.' You obey, but you reluct. I say, 'When at the place we go I send a message, "the cloak is in the car/' Enter.' You enter and you permit the strangler to escape the law."

  He shrugged, stooped to where his brown bowler rested upon the floor beside him, took out the scent spray and squirted verbena upon his forehead.

  "I have the hot brain," he explained; "it is the activity. But yours, my friend"—turning to Grimsby—"is as cool as a lemon."

  EIGHTH EPISODE

  CASE OF THE HEADLESS MUMMIES

  THE mysteries which my eccentric friend, Moris Klaw, was most successful in handling undoubtedly were those which had theirorigin in kinks of the human brain or in the mysterious history of some relic of ancient times.

  I have seen his theory of the Cycle of Crime proved triumphantly time and time again; I have known him successfully to demonstrate how the history of a valuable gem or curio automatically repeats itself, subject, it would seem, to that obscure law of chance into which he had made particular inquiry. Then his peculiar power—assiduously cultivated by a course of obscure study—of recovering from the atmosphere, the ether, call it what you will, the thought-forms—the ideas thrown out by the scheming mind of the criminal he sought for—enabled him to succeed where any ordinary investigator must inevitably have failed.

  "They destroy," he would say in his odd, rumbling voice, "the clumsy tools of their crime; they hide

  away the knife, the bludgeon; they sop up the blood, they throw it, the jemmy, the dead man, the suffocated poor infant, into the ditch, the pool—and they leave intact the odic negative, the photograph of their sin, the thought thing in the air!" He would tap his high yellow brow significantly. "Here upon this sensitive plate I reproduce it, the hanging evidence! The headless child is buried in the garden, but the thought of the beheader is left to lie about. I pick it up. Poof! he swings—that child-slayer! I triumph. He is a dead man. What an art is the art of the odic photograph."

  But I propose to relate here an instance of Moris Klaw's amazing knowledge in matters of archaeology—of the history of relics. In his singular emporium at Wapping, where dwelt the white rats, the singing canary, the cursing parrot, and the other stock-in-trade of this supposed dealer in oddities, was furthermore a library probably unique. It contained obscure works on criminology; it contained catalogues of every relic known to European collectors with elaborate histories of the same. What else it contained I am unable to say, for the dazzling Isis Klaw was a jealous librarian.

  You who have followed these records will have made the acquaintance of Coram, the curator of the Menzies Museum; and it was through Coram that I first came to hear of the inexplicable beheading of mummies, which, commencing with that of Mr.

  Pettigrew's valuable mummy of the priestess Hor-ankhu > developed into a perfect epide
mic. No more useless outrage could well be imagined than the decapitation of an ancient Egyptian corpse; and if I was surprised when I heard of the first case, my surprise became stark amazement when yet other mummies began mysteriously to lose their heads. But I will deal with the first instance, now, as it was brought under my notice by Coram.

  He rang me up early one morning.

  "I say, Searles," he said; "a very odd thing has happened. You've heard me speak of Pettigrew the collector; he lives out Wandsworth way; he's one of our trustees. Well, some demented burglar broke into his house last night, took nothing, but cut off the head of a valuable mummy!"

  "Good Heavens!" I cried. "What an original idea!"

  "Highly so," agreed Coram. "The police are hopelessly mystified, and as I know you are keen on this class of copy I thought you might like to run down and have a chat with Pettigrew. Shall I tell him you are coming?"

  "By all means," I said, and made an arrangement forthwith.

  Accordingly, about eleven o'clock, I presented myself at a gloomy Georgian house standing well back from the high road and screened by an unkempt shrubbery. Mr. Mark Pettigrew, a familiar figure

  at Sotheby auctions, was a little shrivelled man, clean-shaven, and with the complexion of a dried apricot. His big spectacles seemed to occupy a great proportion of his face, but his eyes twinkled merrily and his humour was as dry as his appearance.

  "Glad to see you, Mr. Searles," he said. "You've had some experience of the outre, I believe, and where two constables, an imposing inspector, and a plain-clothes gentleman who looked like a horse have merely upset my domestic arrangements, you may be able to make some intelligent suggestion."

  He conducted me to a large gloomy room in which relics, principally Egyptian, were arranged and ticketed with museum-like precision. Before a wooden sarcophagus containing the swathed figure of a mummy he stopped, pointing. He looked as though he had come out of a sarcophagus himself.