The Great Wash

by Gerald Kersh

  “Rheingold?”

  “That was the name of the guy that had the social security number they tattooed on him. His right name was——”

  “—Dr. Kurt Brevis?” said George Oaks.

  “That’s right,” said Monty Cello. “There’s only one atom-bomb scientist that was certified crazy, locked up in an institution, made a getaway, and disappeared. Dr. Kurt Brevis.”

  “But what could Kadmeel want with Kurt Brevis?” I asked, with excitement.

  “Calm! That’s one of the things we are going to find out, Albert. The point is, Monty, did you find Kurt Brevis?”

  “Yes, I did,” said Monty Cello.

  “You did? Where is he?” I asked.

  Rigid-faced, speaking in the monotone of a prisoner under cross-examination who has to choose between a commitment for contempt of court or a possible charge of perjury, Monty Cello said: “I’m afraid I can’t answer that question.”

  George Oaks asked: “Did you bring him back alive?”

  “No sir, I did not.”

  “Did you bring him back dead, then?” I asked.

  “No, I did not,” said Monty Cello.

  George Oaks said: “You found Kurt Brevis. You didn’t deliver him alive; you didn’t deliver him dead. Is that correct, Monty?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Is he still at large, then?”

  “No, he is not,” said Monty Cello. Then he started, chewed his lips, shook himself, laughed uneasily, and said: “What the hell! Is this the D.A.’s office? I’ve got to trust you guys. Listen. I’ll tell you . . .”

  Part Three

  Given time, and a strong magnet, anyone may find a needle in a haystack. With patience, and a Geiger counter, it is not difficult to pick out a milligram of radium in the mixed detritus of a city dump. But how, unassisted, do you find a missing man in a continent—a shrewd, a cunning man, with keen senses and an unnoticeable face?

  This man, standing up, straddle-legged and at his ease, will occupy about nine square feet of ground; one square yard. The United States of America covers something like one and a half trillion square yards of the world. From square yard to square yard of this vast area, a hundred and fifty million people perpetually shift; and every one of these people is so inconstant that it is impossible even for a serious investigator of man’s mind to squeeze one sixth of the whole truth out of him. . . . In effect: every one of these one and a half trillion squares is the surface—the impermanent, fluctuating surface—of something like a self-playing chessboard with all its incalculable permutations and combinations.

  And even this is an over-simplification, since (if you accept this analogy) you must assume every man to contain within himself the whole game and play of chess in all its imagined and unimagined intricacies, played on as many planes as may exist inside a mysterious cube of black and white cubical blocks strangely inter-blending and inter-penetrable . . . and these very planes are fluid!

  No, no! Your mind baulks at this infinity, so that you must get out of this world, into a dream of Another Dimension . . . in which case you go mad, like that same Kurt Brevis whom Monty Cello was sent to find.

  I believe that, according to human standards, even a man like Einstein must be mad, since he has made an exact science of that which is not, yet. (For “mad” read “precocious”.) He should have been born hereafter. His Dæmon gave him his Theory, as an overdriven nursemaid, for the sake of five minutes of peace and privacy, might give a delicate clock to a wilful and inquisitive child who, properly curious to know what makes it tick, carefully takes it to pieces . . . and so squats weeping in the debris of that which he cannot reassemble, crying for the steady ticking of recorded time, which he has interrupted.

  I draw no comparison, here, between Albert Einstein and Kurt Brevis. I see Einstein now as a sort of prodigious baby, weeping into the wheels of that unpredictably complicated clock, mourning the irretrievable loss of that balance which he will never re-establish, and never should have disturbed . . . a sad man who is sorry for what he did in good faith. He feels now something of the anguish a child feels who confides a dream to someone who looms large, smells of cigars, and inspires confidence in a cosy corner, only to betray him.

  Kurt Brevis, while he was far enough out of this world to transubstantiate his mathematics, was far enough in this world to ask: What is in it for Kurt Brevis?

  Einstein desired only to seek and to find: his giving of what he sought and found was, in a cloudy way, an act of faith. Kurt Brevis, who was comparable with Einstein as a mathematician, but who, being a more fleshly man, was of weaker fibre, hungered after glory and all that goes with it.

  I don’t know what Kurt Brevis hoped for when he offered his services to the U.S. Government. He might have known—surely he must have known—that he who files a key to unlock any of the oubliettes of imprisoned energy must himself be locked up. This much is certain: instead of fame, Kurt Brevis found organised obscurity. Instead of liberty, or licence, for which he must have hungered, he found himself in a kind of comfortable jail. Instead of the wealth that he had led himself to expect, he found himself comparatively poor on a salary of eight thousand dollars a year. Dollar for dollar, an executive in an advertising company selling deodorants could have bought him out before breakfast.

  He belonged to two worlds. Torn between two dreams, his mind split. Suddenly he began to discover “truths” that made no sense. By degrees, but with extraordinary rapidity, he became certifiably insane—incurably so, as the psychiatrists said—and therefore he was put away in what Monty Cello called an “Institution”, closely watched by a strong guard. There was no sense to be got out of Kurt Brevis; but with a man like Kurt Brevis, asleep or awake, one takes no chances.

  In the later stages of his mental breakdown, which the doctors agreed was incurable, he talked constantly of Russia, where a man of his calibre would live like a Prince, served by slaves who would indulge his every whim. He babbled of bullet-proof limousines and sable topcoats; and orgies in the Russian style, saturnalia at which a man might purge, and therefore clarify, his soul by throwing off all the inhibitions that cloud the Christian mind. There was nothing like “getting it out of your system”, he maintained. The viler the sin, the more sincere the repentance, said Kurt Brevis; provided one sinned deliberately, and in cold blood. As a case in point, he observed: Consider a man with the hangover of a seven-day debauch—who could be more unquestionably penitent and therefore closer to God? He took to drinking absolute alcohol diluted with distilled water; raved, laughed, wept, scribbled equations without rhyme or reason. Even if he had toyed with the idea of trafficking with foreign powers—which could not be proved—the doctors certified that Brevis could not be called to account in any court of law because he was no longer responsible for his actions. Even if he might be held responsible, he could do little harm because somewhere in the weird convolutions of that semi-detached brain something had gone wrong. The man who could solve, in his head, in five seconds, the trickiest problem in calculus could not now work out a simple sum without counting on his fingers.

  He wandered in the walled gardens of the institution where he was confined, sometimes silent for days on end, sometimes making up imbecilic rhymes which, he insisted, were of the profoundest significance. For example:

  Bloo bloo

  Oranges moo

  Thistles whistles

  But gladioli

  Lie, lie, lie!

  This, he asserted, was greater than Hamlet, for the Prince of Denmark was an ignoramus; Ophelia, who covered herself with flowers and in drowning displaced her own volume in water—ah, she knew her botany and her physics. . . . Sometimes he played the match game with his attendants, but, since he insisted that 2 was 3, and that 1 was 2, he invariably won. He played for ten million dollars a game, but was idiotically satisfied to acc
ept in settlement a daisy or a fallen leaf. He stored his winnings in a cache under a tree. Later, after Kurt Brevis’s escape, everyone swore he had warned everyone else that Brevis had been putting on an act; that his imbecility was too good to be true. Wise after the event, the doctors talked of the fabulous subtlety of the schizophrenic and of the tortuous cunning of the paranoiac. But the fact remained that Kurt Brevis had disappeared, as completely as if he had evaporated—psst! like spit on a hot-plate, as Monty Cello put it—and the cleverest detectives of two continents had failed to find any trace of him.

  Yet Monty Cello found him.

  “. . . And having found Kurt Brevis, to what address were you supposed to deliver him?” George Oaks asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Monty Cello. “As soon as I found him, I had to cable Major Chatterton, Hotel Henry Morgan, Barbados, giving my whereabouts. I was to hold this Rheingold (as he was called), but hold him tight; and wait for further instructions. See?”

  “But you didn’t? Why not?”

  “Well, in the first place, I was kind of curious. I wanted to find out what this guy had got that was worth that much dough. Because if I played my cards right, well, there might be a chance to make myself a better deal. See? That wouldn’t be easy, and it’d be dangerous as hell. But what the hell? By the time I caught up with him, I had a feeling that things were going my way. I felt lucky, see? I felt I couldn’t go wrong. Because up to then I’d had all the breaks—all the luck in the world, and I felt good, I felt strong. The dice were rolling for me, I couldn’t lose. In the first place, the way I got on the trail of this guy, that was a chance in a million. It was like drawing four cards to an ace, and picking up a royal flush—it could happen, maybe, once in a lifetime. Listen . . .”

  Even if I had the time to tell Monty Cello’s story word for word, I could never convey to you the manner in which he told it, in the recitative sing-song voice of the Carny talker, chopping it up staccato; instinctively avoiding B- and D- and K- and P- and T- sounds on account of his stutter, so that he spoke with a certain insistent sibilance, pausing only to light fresh cigarettes . . .

  . . . He set out with a certain trepidation, for his chances of success were slight and the consequences of failure would be terrible. He travelled by car, stopping at every town between Detroit and Kansas City, sniffing after the broken trail of Kurt Brevis, hoping against hope for some stroke of luck that might lead him to some clue, some scent that Chatterton’s bloodhounds had failed to pick up. He had the criminal’s faith in his luck; the gambler’s love of long odds and last chances. As it happened, his luck held. Yet it was not entirely by chance that Monty Cello picked up the trail of the missing man.

  He reasoned, somewhat as follows: Here is a guy strictly on the lam. He’s got to hide out someplace until it’s safe for him to move again. But he’s got no dough, so he’s got to find some. How? He can’t get work on a farm—he hasn’t got the strength. He’s a scientist; well then, he might get work dispensing in a drug-store; only even if he had the right diplomas and all that, he wouldn’t dare to produce them because if he lets on he’s Kurt Brevis the F.B.I. pick him up in five minutes, and back he goes to the looney bin. . . . Obviously, he’s got something in mind—someplace he wants to go by himself, to play a lone hand—otherwise he might make a deal with the F.B.I. by telling them all about this Major Chatterton set-up, which must be pretty big, and strictly Opposition. No, this guy has got to get someplace by himself. But to get there, he’s got to eat. He can’t ride the rails, because he doesn’t know how, and he daren’t risk being picked up by a railroad dick. He daren’t try to bum his way farther south—which is the way he’s been going steadily—because they’d have him on a chain gang for vagrancy in no time at all. He might get a job in a book store, or something, but that would be pretty dangerous. He couldn’t get work on a boat, because he’s not fit for it in the first place, and in the second place he’s got no papers, and no dough to buy them with. What is the poor guy to do, then? . . . Steal? He’s inexperienced, but, crazy or not crazy, damn smart; otherwise he wouldn’t have slipped away from Chatterton’s set-up the way he did. Steal, maybe . . . but what? And then, they could change his face, but not his finger-prints—one little pinch, and here’s the F.B.I. again. . . . Well, no harm trying. . . .

  So, in Kansas City, Monty Cello went to see a man who ran a flourishing used-car business under the name of Noodnick, but who was otherwise known as Nick the Fence—a formidable power in the not-inconsiderable underworld of the city. Nick the Fence said: “Say, who is this character, for God’s sake? A couple guys were asking for him eight—ten weeks ago. Big Hymie and another one I don’t know: offered two grand for the tip-off on where this little fellow’s holing up. Where the hell would Big Hymie get that kind of dough?”

  “No idea,” said Monty Cello.

  “Sorry I can’t help. You know I would if I could, don’t you. . . . I’ll be seeing you.” As an afterthought he said: “—There’s only one stranger in town that I know of, and he’s keeping the books for Plato the Greek. You might try there.”

  “Keeping the books, eh? For Plato the Greek, eh? Maybe I’ll try there,” said Monty Cello.

  He told us that then and there he had a feeling that he was on the beam. Plato the Greek operated a numbers game over his Hyades Restaurant, and was an old companion of Monty Cello, who went there forthwith. In any case, he was hungry, and liked pilaff. Plato the Greek had kindly remembrances of Monty Cello; invited him to have whatever he liked on the house—pilaff, shishkebab, wine, anything—anything at all. Monty Cello did not say No, but asked as a personal favour to be allowed to take a quick glance at the new book-keeper upstairs, making it clear that this was a private matter and that the book-keeper was in no circumstances to be informed that anyone had been inquiring after him. The Greek laughed richly, opening a bottle of Mavrodaphne, and said that it was necessary only to sit down at such-and-such a table and take it easy; the book-keeper would be coming down to lunch in a few minutes: a harmless old man, “but with the figures, a whiz”—he kissed his hand in ecstasy.

  But the man who came downstairs was not Kurt Brevis, but a pale pink, pop-eyed, boiled shrimp of a man, awkwardly bent and inquisitively bewhiskered like a shrimp. He walked painfully with the aid of two sticks. Monty Cello knew him well. This was the “Professor” to whom he had referred when George Oaks talked of his vagabond ornithologist in the Savoy Hotel. The Professor, whose professional name was Nemo Memo, the Human Calculating Machine, had earned his living for forty years by his freakish photographic memory. One of his tricks was to glance for a second at any printed page which might be held up to him and then, blindfold, to repeat the contents line for line and comma for comma. He had no more intellect than a camera or a wire recorder, but he never failed to astound you: led in by a practised talker, you paid twenty-five cents to see him perform and, before you left his booth in the Carnival, paid another fifty cents for his Complete Guide to Memory Training, with his photograph on the paper cover. He performed in a cowled black robe, and painted his face dark brown. It was given out that he came from Lhassa, the Forbidden City in Thibet; actually his name was MacNabb and he was born in Seattle.

  Monty Cello said: “Hello, Professor. Long time no see.” His hopes were dashed; he was already trying to think of some fresh angle from which he might approach the problem of the missing scientist. In the meantime he had to eat, and, having always a nostalgia for the old carefree days on the road, he invited the old man to join him at lunch. “Quit Carny, Professor?” he asked.

  The Professor replied: “I’m sorry to say I have. The machine breaks down, son. I’m not long for this world, I fear.”

  “What, losing your memory, Professor?”

  “No, son, not that, thank the Lord. Arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis.” He held up his hands, which might have been red rubber gloves stuffed with walnuts. “A terrible afflictio
n. Yes, the old life got to be too much for me. I couldn’t stand the jolting of the cars any longer. The pain kept me awake night after night, so that I got sleepy on the job. Kansas City was my last stand. For the first time in forty years, son, I had to pay out a twenty-dollar prize—here, in Kansas City, of all the places on God’s green earth!”

  “So you quit, eh?” said Monty Cello. “I’m sorry, Professor,” and he took out fifty dollars.

  But the old man waved the money aside, saying: “Bless you, son, you always had a heart of gold; thanks all the same, but I have enough for my modest needs. My grouch-bag was never empty. I have something put by, enough to live on. Besides, Plato pays me fifty dollars a week for my services, and in addition to that there is still something coming in from the old act.”

  “How come, Professor?”

  “Why, there was an Act of Providence, son. The finger of Fate pointed a way, and I took the hint. Losing that twenty dollars would have decided me, anyway. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, son, for you can’t stay young for ever . . . Put your trust in Providence and keep your grouch-bag dry. . . . It happened on our last day in Kansas City. What with pain and tiredness, I was just about all in. I’d made up my mind to finish the day, and then quit once and for all. But my mind was clear—never clearer in all my life. My talker went through the routine, and the marks came crowding in——”