Dr. Phibes

by William Goldstein

  The three men slipped into silence, their heels muffled now by pine needles that had layered over the gravel. The sheer detachment of the place began to tell on Vesalius and he felt as if he’d been walking the morose granite avenues for months, even years. Trout walked a pace or two ahead of the others; he was anxious to get on with the job. The old man merely plodded along, his frame curved around the lamp; their only means of navigation. Abruptly he stopped at a thick archway formed by ropes of ivy that hung between two heavy pines. He stood before the arch and swung his lantern high enough to illuminate the cluster of crypts sequestered within. “You’ll find it in there. First one on your right.”

  He swung the lantern again, this time high enough for Trout to see the lettering carved above the archway. There, hammered in Gothic type face, blackened and corroded by salt air, was the name “Phibes.”

  The caretaker turned to leave, but Vesalius stopped him. “Thank you for your escort, Mr. Cadogan, but tell me, will you be back to show us out?”

  “No, I’ve other rounds to make, you know.”

  “But how will we find our way out?”

  “The same way you came in,” the caretaker shot back over his shoulder, then vanished into the darkness.

  Then they were alone standing at the entrance to the cluster of death apartments. They waited for a few moments getting used to the moonlight, then made their way toward the Phibes crypt which, a bit lower and more imposing than the rest and embellished by rough-hewn granite trim in contrast to the others’ smooth-polished surfaces, acted as an anchor for the grouping.

  The door was heavy iron lattice which opened on well-oiled hinges at Trout’s touch. Once inside he groped along the stone coping to find some candles. “We’d be lost without this lot,” he said with obvious relief as he lit two, handing one to Vesalius. The crypt flared up before them out of its accustomed darkness. Three of the room’s four walls contained spaces for caskets; these were arranged in five rows of five caskets each. Almost all of the spaces were occupied as shown by the nameplates.

  Trout scanned the somber assemblage, peering first at the left wall, then the center, and then, finding nothing, turned his attention to the right wall. Gradually a geneaology unfolded: Orion Phibes, December 12, 1792; Eleanor Phibes, March 5, 1817; Marius Phibes, January 8, 1886, Katherine Phibes, February 24, 1890. Finally his light located what they’d been looking for on the bottom row. The brass nameplate was unmistakable: Anton Phibes, April 21, 1921.

  “Right next to his wife’s,” Vesalius said in a hushed tone. “Let’s take a look.”

  Trout put the candles on the stone shelving overhead and both men bent to the task. Gradually they urged the brass casket out from its niche but only after both had shoved and strained to get it moving. At last it was out.

  Trout pried the lid open and lifted it upward, until its interior velvet straps were bent tight. “It’s empty,” he sputtered.

  “Save for this.” Vesalius pointed to a small silver box which shown dully in the flickering light. He reached in to open it.

  “Ashes,” Trout muttered when Vesalius had got it open.

  “They don’t tell us a helluva lot!”

  “Except that someone was cremated in that car crash. The Swiss authorities have acknowledged that much.” Vesalius sensed the hesitation in Trout’s voice. “And . . . ?”

  Trout accepted the gambit. “It’s possible that those ashes are someone else’s. His chauffeur, another passenger, or perhaps the car’s remains.”

  “And that Anton Phibes is back in London.”

  “Your Mr. Darrow said it this afternoon.” Trout smiled at Vesalius, then looked down at the space next to Phibes’. “Here, his wife’s casket’s been tampered with!”

  Vesalius’ eyes shot down at the place where Victoria Phibes lay. The stone drawer extended a hair’s breadth from the wall and the dust around its edges had been swept clean. They slid it all the way out, then lifted up the top of the stately oaken casket. The coffin was quite empty!

  It was well past midnight when Henri Vesalius got back to his apartment. And it was only when he’d shut the door behind him that he realized how cold he’d been. He went into the pantry and put the kettle on for tea. Maybe that would bring some warmth to his sod-dampened bones. He prowled about the cupboards for the tea box and was amused at how reassuring the stacks of brightly covered canned goods looked.

  He and Trout had spoken very little after they left the Phibes crypt. Vesalius was loathe to advance any conclusions on their discovery, preferring rather to let the crushing gravel underfoot carry the weight of their presence in that largest of London cemeteries. Besides, he was certain that Trout would shortly, if he hadn’t already, come to the same assessment: an elaborate murder-vendetta was in process of being stage-managed by someone close to the Phibes family. This was confirmed by the empty casket of Victoria Phibes and was certainly not denied by the ashes in that of her husband. That the stage manager—killer was too prosaic a description, Vesalius had decided—was a man of culture was evidenced by the modes of death he’d so artfully contrived and visited upon the four hapless doctors. That he was a man of considerable technical ability was demonstrated in his evident display of talent in poor Longstreet’s dispatch. And, if he could work with the precision of a surgeon, he was also capable of the grand design. Hargreaves’ death, staged in full view of a sizeable fraction of London’s prominent, was achieved with a grandeur appropriate to the surroundings.

  The teakettle’s whistle brought Vesalius out of his musings. It had been a very long evening and his skin, still chilled from the gloomy excursion across Highgate, remained unwarmed by the tea which now steeped in the scalding water. He cut a piece of lemon and dropped it into his cup, letting it bubble for a bit before sipping the brew. Then he drank the whole cup slowly and with great deliberation, waiting for some warmth to return. Finally he turned the kitchen light off and went up to bed, still cold.

  While Vesalius tossed in fitful sleep, the house on Maldine Square jounced and jumbled with the ripping chords of Bach’s great organ concerto. The music towered and soared, billowing volumes into every reach of the house, sending a shiver into the very windowpanes with audible tone. Stairs and floors vibrated and draperies fluttered with the pounding, the roof channeling the sounds down into the darkened house like some midnight cathedral. But where the great baroque composer defined the dimension of godliness in men, the organist’s rendition of the master’s music this night possessed a harshness far beyond the composer’s intent.

  The music stopped and the source of its perversion became immediately apparent with the emergence of the Master of the Letter “P” from one of the countless main floor chambers on his way to another door on the same level; a door to the room which housed all the mementoes, effects and clothing of the exquisite creature who seemed to have captured his fatal affection.

  This night he wore no cloak but was dressed in a long elegant sleeping jacket of gray silk quilted against the cold. His thin hair was combed back from his forehead, giving his long head a streamlined aspect. His bearing and poise bore the stamp of nobility. His hands, now ungloved, were long and tapered and gave full advertisement to his musical accompaniment. But it was in his eyes that confirmation finally came. Hard, intense, steeled, they left little doubt that this monumentally somber man and Anton Phibes were, or could have been, one and the same man.

  But this evening he was far from pensive. The music, despite the death edge his hands had placed upon it, eminently contained all of Bach’s zest. It was with that same zest, rather than remorse, that he entered the Shrine Room. Once inside he moved to a segment of wall on which were artfully displayed a series of photographs of Victoria and himself. Content now, he looked at them carefully. In one they toasted the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. A second pictured Victoria, dressed in a dazzling short white rhinestone dress, doing the Charleston on top of a table, while Phibes applauded on the sidelines. With him was the then curre
nt Prince of Wales. Another photograph showed the beautiful couple dancing a stately pavanne at a lavish costume ball. That Phibes was a man of art was demonstrated by his choice of costume; elegantly outfitted in Napoleon’s battle dress, he literally towered over Victoria, herself gorgeous in an Empire gown. A fourth photo held his attention longer than the others. It was a single shot of Victoria, dressed in an emerald green bathing costume, which offset her long reddish-brown hair and milk-white skin. She was reclining before a pool against a backdrop of fern and, in the stilled forest sunlight, spelled the full measure of Phibes’ devotion. She was an odalisque!

  From these reminiscences he moved to the beautifully inlaid dais beneath the woman’s portrait and, glancing again at Victoria’s image as if to discover a new shading of expression, began to arrange a bouquet of cut spring flowers in a Wedgwood vase on the dais. When the flowers had been plucked and pushed into a floral spray of considerable art, he applied a match to two incense-filled urns, sending smoke spirals about the portrait. Then he unfurled a long phono-jack from a portable console next to the dais and, plugging it into his neck aperture, knelt before Victoria’s portrait in reverie.

  He held himself in absolute silence this way for several moments, his flickering eyes index to his great concentration. The plumes of incense and the whir and hum of the equipment seemed to highlight his devotion. Then he finished and, reaching absently for another switch on the console, raised his eyes in withered despair to the portrait. Presently his voice, intensely harsh but strangely cultured, filled the room. His words, coming now from some mechanical process rather than his featureless face, were doubly poignant: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” He began to weep, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”

  He wiped away another tear. “My love, sweet queen, noble wife, severed too quickly, too cruelly from this life. I remain and suffer to bring delivery of your pain. Of fires drawn and memories met, soon we shall hold our two precious hearts in single time . . .”

  He could stand it no longer and, groping again for the switch, shut off his mournful paean. Then he put his head down on the dais and sobbed, his shoulders low under a great weight of grief.

  Chapter 11

  MARK Kitaj was one of the best vascular surgeons to have come along in the decade. His brash brilliance often cored astonishing results considered impossible by the medical savants of the time. Neither a theorist nor a tactician, he was that rare breed amongst physician-scientists: an intuitive pragmatist. In the surgical amphitheatre, he was direct and totally practical; he made things work.

  But he was a hack. A product of Sheffield and Oxford, he’d interned at Guy’s Hospital under, among others, Henri Vesalius. It was at Sheffield that he developed a healthy interest in the research aspects of surgery, an interest that stayed with him during and through his internship. Among other things Kitaj perfected a technique for intestinal resection which shaved the standard six-hour operating time in half. Working with white rats, he first demonstrated their physiological compatibility to humans in a brilliantly executed series of studies. After that, he was able to work out the hemostatic techniques in six months. It took him almost as long to persuade the surgical director at Guy’s Hospital to permit a clinical trial. Finally, over a great deal of opposition, he was given a chance to prove himself. That one chance was all he needed. The patient, a retired railway brakeman, was considered a dangerous surgical risk; had not a bowel obstruction threatened his life, he would never have been brought into surgery.

  Kitaj’s operation was a faultless demonstration of his technique. It earned him a standing ovation from the several hundred spectators gathered in the amphitheatre to watch him—at the same time that it earned him the deep enmity of the old staff members who had opposed him. The operation saved the patient’s life and won for Mark Kitaj a measure of fame denied to most men.

  But if young Kitaj drove hard at work, he was an equally driving man at play. He owned a yellow Stutz Bearcat that gave him more speed than he needed. He enjoyed horse racing, pursuing the thoroughbreds at Aintree and Epsom. Kitaj was an excellent handicapper and there was talk that he averaged 5,000 pounds a year from his work with the racing form. On those weekends he spent in town, his elegant small apartment in Kensington was the scene of intimate parties to which were attracted some of the more dazzling beauties on the social scene. He wore these women like jewels, picking them up one at a time for a period that never exceeded ninety days.

  His current protege was Audrey Basehart, a raven-tressed beauty of nineteen whom he’d met at one of the champagne receptions at the Grand National three weeks earlier. Audrey was an accomplished horsewoman, tall and reserved in appearance—qualities which immediately attracted Kitaj. After a period of conflicting schedules she contrived to visit friends in London for an extended stay. Geography and passion did the rest and the young couple managed to see each other nearly every day of her stay. This particular Wednesday she was waiting for Kitaj in his office-study at the hospital while he finished his morning’s cases.

  She’d come early so they could have a leisurely lunch. Then Mark was going out to Northolt Aerodrome for his first solo flight and she, squeamish about this new hobby, would visit the Tate Gallery during the afternoon. They planned to meet later that evening and go to the theatre.

  Audrey’s ruddy cheeks were in full bloom and her skin glowed from the excitement she’d known since meeting Mark Kitaj. Although she’d been formally introduced to the social whirl at her coming-out party and had been pursued by scores of apple-cheeked young swains, she’d known little of sensual pleasures. That wasn’t for lack of trying by the young men in her life, or by young men who wanted to be in her life; for Audrey Basehart had all the attributes, and more, of those things considered necessary to feminine beauty.

  At 5’7” she was taller than most other young women, in her sphere. Her black shoulder-length hair, which she wore loose or bound with a single gold rope, set her apart somewhat, but it was her carriage that gave her a distinction above others. She walked with long strides, literally throwing her legs forward in an evenness of gait that announced great determination. She looked neither right nor left when she walked but kept her eyes straight ahead.

  Audrey was also purposeful, having mastered Russian while still in public school—and mastered it sufficiently to be able to correspond with a pen pal in Kiev. This young man expressed little personal ardor for her and filled his letters instead with his abiding devotion to chess and the poetry of Pushkin. Nevertheless, the letters caused concern, a concern which built into a full-blown rumor that “the Basehart girl” was being corrupted by a Bolshevik radical. Audrey enjoyed her notoriety immensely, refusing even to show the letters to her father when he demanded that she either clear up the rumor or break off the correspondence. She remained steadfast against all family entreaties and kept the growing stack of pale blue envelopes on her desk, protected by a red ribbon, to emphasize her decision.

  Audrey’s triumph came at her graduation when she delivered a paper entitled “An Enquiry into the Causes of the Great War” in which she excoriated the Hapsburgs, the Romanovs and the Windsors with equal spleen and precision. To no one’s surprise but her family and friends, the paper was published in The Observer! Shortly after that, the young scholar, who was then hardly eighteen, was accepted at the London School of Economics.

  She immediately confounded everyone by announcing that she planned to take a year off from school so she could prepare herself for the rigors of study by writing and research. She had just completed a draft on “The Economic Impact of the U-Boat Campaign on the British Economy in 1917” when she met Mark Kitaj.

  The young surgeon’s energy simply overwhelmed her. Like the scores of faceless young men who appeared at her home bearing candies and flowers with monotonous regularity, Mark Kitaj possessed all the necessary credentials to a successful career in the uppermost echelons of his profession. He was a bit older, it was true, but he was also different
, markedly different. For while success was measured by where a man had been or could go, and by the collection of comforts he’d managed to acquire, Kitaj seemed far more interested in pursuing an idealistic stance. And in a profession that was, by nature, a group effort, he took great pride in his own work. It was this individualism, this precise attention to detail that fascinated, attracted, and quickly overwhelmed Audrey Basehart.

  During the course of their short courtship, she’d felt her own reserve slip away and was amused to discover that its loss almost didn’t matter. His initial letters to her were correct, models of decorum; they quickened her pulse not so much from what he said but by the fact that he’d chosen to write at all. He didn’t ask her to join him in London. Rather, it seemed the right thing to do. Her parents, of course, questioned the propriety of the move but she countered their objections with assurances that she would spend most of her time completing arrangements for school.

  Kitaj had sense enough not to pursue Audrey overtly. Their first meetings were subdued, amounting to little more than dinner at some of the better restaurants in the West End. On Wednesday mornings he served at the clinics, after which he was free the rest of the day. They used these afternoons to explore the great city, meeting at Westminster Abbey, at St. Martins-in-the-Field, at Cheyne Walk. Saturdays they enjoyed the programs at the Old Vic, and Saturday nights Mark showed Audrey off at a carefully selected round of parties.

  They spent Sundays apart, she refusing to accompany Mark to the aerodrome to watch him practice his new hobby. Flying, which had been transformed from an art to a science by the War, had become fashionable, even popular in the post-war years.

  Mark Kitaj had been flying for eight months, having learned on a Spad Trainer. After mastering the rudiments, he graduated to a de Haviland DH4. Because of the confinement and controlled tensions of the operating room, his air trips were like electric discharges. Sundays he went to Northolt regularly, almost religiously.