Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  And there you have The Dragon Strikes Back, an alternative classic with a little bit of everything—a truly wonderful piece of work. The brain of Tom Roan must have been marvelous to behold.

  The brain of Pronzini boggleth to consider it.

  8. The Vanishing Cracksman,

  the Norman Conquest, and

  the Death Merchant

  "Anything you like, Theo," said Drummond. "I'm perfectly happy talking about you. How the devil do you do it?" He sat up and stared at the other man with genuine wonder on his face. "Eyes differentnose—voice—figure—everything different. You're a marvel—but for that one small failing of yours."

  "You interest me profoundly," said the clergyman. "What is this one small failing that makes you think I am other than what I profess to be?"

  Drummond laughed genially.

  "Good heavens, don't you know what it is? It's that dainty little trick of yours of tickling the left ear with the right big toe that marks you every time. No man can do that, Theo, and blush unseen."

  —"Sapper,"

  The Black Gang

  Gentleman rogues, as any aficionado of detective fiction knows, were popular long before their uncouth cousins, the violence-oriented antiheroes, came into vogue in the second half of this century. The British in particular have always had a special fondness for the outlaw (or reformed outlaw), providing he is well-bred, witty, urbane, gallant, and given to a certain sentimentalism when it comes to the poor and the downtrodden. Such an outlaw, of course, is the modern version of Robin Hood—the anti-Establishment hero tilting at authority, mocking its representatives, lusting after adventure and embracing danger with both hands, but ever ready to lay down his life for a proper cause.

  The first of these fictional rogues was sportsman and thief A. J. Raffles, the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung. Raffles (and his Boswell—or, if you prefer, his Watson—Bunny) made his debut in The Amateur Cracksman (1899) and carried on his life of crime until Hornung's death in 1921. But that was not the end of his career; Philip Atkey, under his pseudonym of Barry Perowne, revived the character in the 1930s, reformed him (he no longer steals for thrill or gain but to help others, in the true Robin Hood fashion), and has kept him alive to the present in a series of short stories.

  The early success of Hornung's Raffles inspired other writers to try their hand at a gentleman rogue: Maurice Leblanc's Arsene Lupin, Frank L. Packard's Jimmy Dale, "The Gray Seal," and Thomas W. Hanshew's Hamilton Cleek. For our purposes here, Hanshew and Cleek are by far the most interesting of these.

  Thomas Hanshew was an American dime novelist who had worked on the Nick Carter series, among others, for Street & Smith, and who came to admire the "pure" detective story form. Dissatisfied with his lot as an uncredited purveyor of obscure sensationalism, he decided to purvey a brand of sensationalism that was neither obscure nor uncredited and that would garner him a legitimate reputation as a detective-story writer. Thus he begat Hamilton Cleek, "the man of Forty Faces," a.k.a. "the Prince of Mauravania," a.k.a "the Vanishing Cracksman."

  Cleek is something of a unique character for several reasons. The first is that despite Hanshew's American heritage, Cleek is British and operates for the most part in London and environs.

  His compatriots are also British (or French), and the manner in which he solves his cases is a mixture of Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, and Nick Carter. Except for a tendency on Hanshew's part to have his English characters speak like Teddy Roosevelt, whom Hanshew obviously admired ("Bully boy! Bully boy!"), it might be difficult for anyone unfamiliar with the author's background to determine that he was not himself a British subject.

  The second unique quality about Cleek is that he possesses a curious ability to disguise himself at a moment's notice, which is why he is known as "the man with the Forty Faces." Unlike other masters of disguise, however, such as Nick Carter, Cleek does not need makeup, false whiskers and hair, or other theatrical trappings. He has been blessed with extreme mobility of features as well as a kind of rubber-textured skin and is therefore able to twist his face into unrecognizable features or into a lookalike image of someone else. This amazing talent is particularly handy when he infiltrates the lairs of his archenemies; even up close, as Messrs. Barzun and Taylor point out in A Catalogue of Crime, none can "tell a hawk from a Hanshew."

  In the early stages of his career, Cleek is a master thief who taunts the police with cryptic notes informing them of what he will steal next and then disguises himself and proceeds to steal the item from under their very noses. In the opening "chapter" of Cleek, The Master Detective—a 1918 collection of short stories masquerading as an episodic novel—we are told that Cleek "was the biggest and the boldest criminal the police had ever had to cope with, the almost supernatural genius of crime, who defied all systems, laughed at all laws, mocked at all the Vidocqs, the Lupins, and Sherlock Holmeses, whether amateur or professional, French or English, German or American, that ever had or ever could be pitted against him, and who, for sheer devilry, for diabolical ingenuity, and for colossal impudence, as well as for a nature-bestowed power that was simply amazing, had not his match in all the universe."

  A rogue among rogues, you will admit.

  But then a strange thing happens: Cleek falls in love. The object of his affection is not Margot, his beautiful accomplice in crime and leader of a band of French Apaches, but a well-born Englishwoman named Ailsa Lorne. When an "almost supernatural genius of crime" falls, he falls hard; Cleek's passion for Ailsa is of such monumental proportions that, to the disbelief of everyone (including the reader), he returns to Superintendent Narkom of Scotland Yard half of a fortune in jewels stolen from the daughter of Ailsa's uncle, Sir Horace Wyvern. And with the jewels he includes a letter:

  There's some good in even the devil, I suppose, if one but knows how to reach it and stir it up.

  I have lived a life of crime from my very boyhood because I couldn't help it, because it appealed to me, because I glory in risks and revel in dangers. I never knew, I never thought, never cared, where it would lead me, but I looked into the gateway of heaven last night, and I can't go down the path to hell any more.

  The letter goes on to say that if Narkom and Wyvern will agree to a meeting with Cleek, he'll return the other half of the jewels and convert a useless life into a useful one by making the Vanishing Cracksman disappear forever. Narkom and Wyvern are only too willing to meet with Cleek. On his arrival, he hands over the rest of the jewels, tells them he has broken with Margot and the Apaches, and says, "I want to know if it is my fault that I am what I am, and if it is myself I have to fight in the future or the devil that lives within me. I'm tired of wallowing in the mire. A woman's eyes have lit the way to heaven for me. I want to climb up to her, to win her, to be worthy of her, and to stand beside her in the light." Then he asks Sir Horace to examine him and to let him know "if I or Fate's to blame for what I am."

  "Absolutely Fate," Sir Horace said. "It is the criminal brain fully developed, horribly pronounced. God help you, my poor fellow; but a man simply could not be other than a thief and a criminal with an organ like that. There's no hope for you to escape your natural bent except by death. You can't be honest. You can't rise. You never will rise; it's useless to fight against it!"

  "I will fight against it! I will rise! I will! I will! I will!" he cried out vehemently. "There is a way to put such craft and cunning to account; a way to fight the devil with his own weapons and crush him under the weight of his own gifts, and that way I'll take!

  "Mr. Narkom"—he whirled and walked toward the superintendent, his hand outstretched, his eager face aglow—"lVIr. Narkom, help me! Take me under your wing. Give me a start, give me a chance, give me a lift on the way up!"

  "Good heavens, man, you—you don't mean—T'

  "I do. I do. So help me Heaven, I do. All my life I've

  fought against the law, now let me switch over and fight with it. I'm tired of being Cleek, the thief; Cleek,
the burglar. Make me Cleek, the detective, and let us work together, hand in hand, for a common cause and for the public good. Will you, Mr. Narkom? Will you?"

  "Will I? Won't I!" said Narkom, springing forward and gripping his hand. "Jove! what a detective you will make. Bully boy! Bully boy!"

  The result of this stirring scene is that Cleek does become a sort of roguish detective—an unofficial free-lancer to whom Narkom brings a variety of baffling and bizarre cases (or riddles, as Cleek prefers to call them) involving locked rooms, mysterious monsters, black magic, espionage, and other Victorian melodramatics. In addition to Narkom, recurring characters include Ailsa Lorne (naturally), a vindictive Margot and her Apaches (naturally), and Dollops, Cleek's devoted henchman—"a youth he had picked up out of the streets of London and given a home, and whose especial virtues were a dog-like devotion to his employer, a facility for eating without ever seeming to get filled, and fighting without ever seeming to get tired." Another of Dollops's virtues is an inventive turn of mind; one of his inventions is a "man-trap," made of heavy brown paper cut into squares and thickly smeared over with "a viscid, varnish-like substance that adhered to the feet of anybody incautiously stepping upon it, and so interfered with flight that it was an absolute necessity to stop and tear the papers away before running with any sort of ease and swiftness was possible." Dollops never travels anywhere without a full supply of ready-cut papers and a "big collapsible tube" of the viscid, ropy glue. He is so proud of this invention of his that he even has a name for it. He calls it his Tickle Tootsies.

  Perhaps Cleek's most remarkable case is "The Problem of the Red Crawl," which also appears in Cleek, The Master Detective. Summoned by an anonymous letter to Superintendent Narkom, Cleek travels to an abandoned house in Paris and there, to his amazement, finds Ailsa Lorne, who tells him that she has been living in the nearby Chateau Larouge with a friend named Athalie and Athalie's father, the baron de Carjorac. Cleek says, "Baron de Carjorac? Do you mean the French minister of the interior, the president of the Board of National Defences, Miss Lorne, that enthusiastic old patriot, that rabid old spitfire whose one dream is the wresting back of Alsace-Lorraine, the driving of the hated Germans into the sea? Do you mean that ripping old firebrand?"

  Ailsa says, "Yes."

  She goes on to say that all sorts of terrible things have been happening at the Chateau Larouge, which the baron moved into after a mysterious fire destroyed his villa. (Cleek recalls, from his past experiences with the French Apaches, that there is an underground passage at the Chateau Larouge that connects with the Paris sewers. Hmmm . . .) A man named Merode wants to marry Athalie; his sister, madame la comtesse de la Tour, owns the chateau; they were the ones who insisted that Athalie and the baron move into the house after the mysterious fire. ("Oho!" Cleek says. "I think I begin to smell the toasting of the cheese!") After she and Athalie and the baron arrived, Ailsa continues, madame la comtesse told them that Chateau Larouge was haunted by "a sort of family ghost, a dreadful visitant known as 'The Red Crawl.'" And what is the Red Crawl? "A hideous and loathsome creature," Ailsa explains. "It was neither spider nor octopus, but horribly resembled both and was supposed to 'appear' at intervals in the middle of the night and, like the fabled giants of fairy tales, carry off 'lovely maidens and devour them.' "

  Her story becomes even more bizarre. The baron de Carjorac is terrified of spiders, a fact that Merode and madame la comtesse are well aware of; the Red Crawl has been visiting the baron during the night, had even touched him on one occasion. It was "a horrible, hideous red reptile," Ailsa says, "with squirming tentacles, a huge, glowing body, and eyes like flame. It had crept upon him out of the darkness, he knew not from where. It had seized him, resisted all his wild efforts to tear loose from it, and when he finally sank, overcome and fainting, upon the floor, his last conscious recollection was of the loathsome thing settling down upon his breast and running its squirming 'feelers' up and down his body."

  Cleek ponders for a moment. Then, with his usual nonpareil logic, he says, "There's something decidedly German about that fabulous 'monster' and that haunted Chateau, Miss Lorne. They are clever and careful schemers, those German Johnnies." After which he postulates that Germany wants to attack England by way of France, needs to know the number, location, and manner of France's secret defenses, and has decided to send agents to obtain the information through Baron de Carjorac. Furthermore, Cleek says, the Red Crawl must have lifted some important document from the baron during his nocturnal groping; otherwise the baron, with his congenital loathing of all crawling things, would have departed the chateau immediately.

  Ailsa is thrilled by such brilliant deduction and tells him so. Then she admits to having seen the Red Crawl herself (" 'It was like a blood-red spider, with the eyes, the hooked beak, and the writhing tentacles of an octopus.' ") and to having overheard a conversation between Merode and madame la coxntesse, during which he called her Margot and gave her an emphatically unbrotherly kiss. The true identity and motivations of madame la comtesse are obvious to Cleek right away: his old girl friend Margot has gone to work for the Germans to spite the Vanishing Cracksman. He also identifies the name Clodoche, which Ailsa overheard Merode mention; "Clodoche is a renegade Alsatian," he says, "a spy in the pay of the German government, and an old habitue of 'The Inn of the Twisted Arm,' where the Queen of the Apaches and her pals hold their frequent revels."

  Armed with all this information, and with the blessings of his beloved Ailsa, Cleek heads for the chateau Larouge. That night, after Ailsa has explained to the baron about Cleek and the baron has agreed to cooperate, Cleek impersonates the French minister. In the dark of Baron de Carjorac's bedroom, the Cracksman then encounters the Red Crawl: "It slid first one tentacle and then another over his knees and up toward his breast, and still he made no movement; then as it rose until its hideous beaked countenance was close to his own, his hands flashed upward and clamped together like a vise—clamped on a palpitating human throat."

  The Red Crawl, it develops, not very surprisingly, is only a man dressed up in a costume and mask—an Apache named Serpice, whom Cleek recognizes. There is a tremendous fight, during which Cleek tries to force Serpice to tell him the password that Clodoche must give to Margot at The Twisted Arm in order for her to relinquish the stolen document. But to no avail. Serpice manages to make enough noise to summon Merode, which leaves Cleek no choice except to flee. And where he flees is through the trapdoor, into the secret passage that leads to the lair of the Apaches.

  The scene shifts to The Twisted Arm, where Margot and her band are engaged in the night's revelry. Soon, as they are in the midst of their bacchanal, "there rolled up suddenly a voice crying, as from the bowels of the earth, 'Hola! Hola! La! la! loi!' the cry of the Apache to his kind." And Cleek enters, but not as Cleek; he has rearrranged his face so that now he looks like Clodoche.

  He asks Margot if she has the document; she says she does, "tenderly shielded," and taps the bodice of her dress. Cleek demands the paper so it can be taken to one Count von Hetzler, a German spy waiting outside. She tells him he must first give her the password. Cleek makes an incorrect guess and then remembers that there is only one phrase ever used for a password among the Kaiser's people: "To the day!" And of course that's it.

  "Bravo!" she said, with a little hiccough, for the absinthe, of which she had imbibed so freely tonight, was beginning to take hold of her. "A pretty conspirator to forget how to open the door he himself locked! It is well I know thee; it is well it was our word in the beginning, or I had been suspicious, silly! Wait but a moment"—putting her hand to her breast and beginning to unfasten her bodice—"wait but a moment, Monsieur Twitching-Fingers, and the thing shall be in your hand."

  But Margot, in her drunken state, takes too long to open up her dress. Dollops, whom Cleek has positioned in the sewers to act as a lookout, gives a warning blast on a whistle: the real Clodoche is on his way into The Twisted Arm. Instead of putting his hand inside Margot's bodice, where
he had presumably had it on numerous occasions in the old days, and removing the document himself, Cleek continues to wait for her to fumble it out herself. This ill-advised sense of propriety almost results in his capture, for Merode suddenly breaks into the room, followed by Serpice, and shouts, "That devil, that renegade, that fury, Cleek, the Cracksman, is here. He came to the rescue out of the very skies and all but killed Serpice!"

  Nevertheless, Cleek manages to leap over the bar, shut off the gaslights, throw a chair through the window, and escape the room. The crowd of Apaches converges on the bar and then streams out in hot pursuit. Before long they see "a lithe, thin figure, dressed as one of their own kind, spring up in the path of that other figure, jump on it, grip it, clap a huge square of sticky brown paper [one of Dollops's Tickle Tootsies] over the howling mouth, and bear it, struggling and kicking, to the ground." The Apaches, thinking the howling figure is Cleek, swarm over it and hack away at it with their dirks. When they drag the body inside, however, they are astonished to discover that the man they have killed is not Cleek but Clodoche.

  And when the gas lamps are lit again, they also discover that "there on the floor, her limp hands turned palms upward, a chloroformed cloth folded over her mouth and nose, lay the figure of Margot, her bodice torn wide open and the paper forever gone!"