The Great Wash

by Gerald Kersh

  Titmouse shook with laughter, and poured three large drinks. “You can have the bottle at the shop-price, seeing it’s you and Mr. Oaks, Mr. Kemp,” he said.

  I took my drink neat, in one gulp, and replenished my glass. “I say,” said Titmouse, “you’re a thirsty gentleman today!”

  Then George Oaks came in and said: “Everything’s all right, Albert. They’ll be along about tea-time.”

  “Visitors?” asked Titmouse. “I hear you got a gentleman staying with you, Mr. Kemp, with a posh liddle brand-new M. G. motor-car.”

  George Oaks said: “Just an overnight visitor, Titmouse. Some friends are coming to pick him up about tea-time.”

  “Well, I’ll leave you gentlemen to it,” said Titmouse. “I better get down the cellar to put the beer on. If you leave before I’m back, pull the back door to, won’t you, now? My best respects, gentlemen.” Titmouse swallowed his drink, touched the place where his forelock used to be, and left us.

  “So that’s that,” I said heavily.

  “That’s that, I’m afraid,” said George Oaks. “Try and look at it objectively, Albert. The man may be your guest, in a manner of speaking, but, after all, he is a dangerous criminal. Have another drink.”

  “I know that,” I said, “and I daresay he deserves to be hanged a dozen times over. But I mean to say . . . under my own roof!”

  “Oh, you and your roof! You’ve been reading too many of your own silly stories about Arab sheiks, or something. Say it had been Rudolph Hess. Would you have felt called upon to keep him in hiding for the duration of the war? Be reasonable.”

  “There’s something in that, I suppose. Still . . .”

  “Still what? And again: let Monty go now, and you put him on the defensive. In the first place, he’d want his papers back, and then there’d be ructions, and you or I would have to knock him down. If he got away, and found the police after him, he’d try the last resort—shooting his way out—and then there’d be bloodshed, and he’d hang for sure. He may not look it, but that little fellow can be deadly, Albert; a man who favours a .32 revolver on a .38 frame is a one-shot killer, take it from me.”

  “What guarantee have we that he hasn’t made copies of those papers?” I asked.

  “What for? Monty Cello was working strictly alone. If he did photostat those papers, with whom would he trust them?”

  “He might hide them somewhere, so that if Chatterton caught up with him he’d still be in a position to make a deal.”

  “No. He wouldn’t be so stupid as to hope that Chatterton wouldn’t double-cross him, or find some nasty means of making him talk. No, no, Monty Cello is dreeing his weird alone, Albert.”

  “Then who phoned him at the Savoy?” I asked.

  “My guess is this: Chatterton knew that someone calling himself Monty Cello was somewhere in London. He reasoned that Monty wouldn’t go to some little out-of-the-way pension where he’d stick out like a punch in the mouth; he’d go to some great hotel where all kinds of foreigners are constantly coming and going. Furthermore, Albert, Chatterton was working on the assumption that his man was quite sure that no one except Pen Quillan, who forged his passport, knew his pseudonym. What Chatterton did was this, therefore: he telephoned all the first-class London hotels, to begin with, asking if there was a Mr. Monty Cello registered there. Almost certainly, the operator at the Savoy said: ‘Who is calling, please?’ ‘Oh, just a friend,’ said Chatterton. ‘Hold the line a moment, please,’ said the operator, and paged Monty Cello. He, thinking that this call was from Regent Lambert, dashed to the telephone, and then Chatterton was probably indiscreet enough to say ‘Hello’ or something. Monty Cello recognised the voice; or perhaps he asked: ‘Are you the man I wrote to?’—whereupon Chatterton says: ‘That’s right.’ Then Monty Cello, always suspicious, asks: ‘What’s your name?’—and Chatterton can’t answer this. So Monty Cello takes fright and clears out. . . . No, I don’t believe poor Monty has a friend in London, or in the whole world for that matter. Courage, Albert. The troubles of our proud and angry dust are from eternity and cannot fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale. One more drink, then home. It’s a quarter past three, and the pie will be baked.”

  “Well, let’s face it,” I said. “Only I wish he hadn’t given me that hand-painted tie . . . and as for sitting at table with him and helping him to pie, well! To complete the picture, I feel I ought to kiss him first, and later on take thirty shillings blood-money, and then go and hang myself on the Judas tree in St. Wilfred’s churchyard.”

  “Come on,” said George Oaks.

  We left by the tortuous path that leads from the back garden of the “Piebald Horse” through a thicket to the road, Oaks carrying the beer-jar. We had walked no more than a hundred yards towards the house, when Mrs. Rose came panting round Little Dene Corner. When she saw us, she screamed: “Mis-ter Kemp! Oh sir, quick! The gentleman’s in the well!”

  Oaks and I ran then. The milkman passed us in his cart, lashing his old horse into a gallop. I heard him shout: “Man down the well—going get ropes!” Then we were in my garden. I saw Barnes, the gardener, dragging a clothes-line to which were pegged several pairs of socks. A little group of men were gathered about the well. One of them was yelling: “Tread water, tread water, man! Empty the bucket and hold it topside up—it’ll keep you afloat! Tread water! Tread water! Help’s coming!” I did not recognise the voice, it reverberated so. But when the man straightened himself to look about him, I saw that he was Sir Peter Oversmith, wearing an old leather-patched shooting jacket and a canvas fishing hat. Beside him, elegant in green Donegal tweeds, stood Major Chatterton, with a 12-bore shotgun under his arm.

  “Rope! Rope! Rope! Rope! Rope!” cried Sir Peter—he sounded like a mastiff barking, but with his great bristling grizzled head, with its red eyes, snouted face, brutal jowls, and huge upturned white moustaches, he looked like an old wild boar. He leaned over to shout: “Can you hear me down there?”

  There was no answer. Barnes, paying out the clothes-line, bellowed: “Catch ’old o’ this, sir, and we’ll ’ave you out in a jiffy.” But the line hung limp. He said to me: “I’m afraid ’e ’it ’is ’ead, sir, when ’e went over. I’ll swear I ’eard it crack on the brick.”

  Sir Peter shouted: “Bloody hell, where’s that scamp with the confounded rope?”

  Major Chatterton, who appeared unperturbed, said: “Some of you get sheets from the house and knot them together. Hurry!” But then, the milkman returned with a coil of stout rope, followed by a couple of sturdy timber-fellers and an excited Airedale dog. Barnes shook his head. “I don’t like this, sir, damned if I do,” he said. “ ’E’s been down there nigh on ten minutes, and not a sound.”

  George Oaks was undressing. He had thrown off his coat and kicked off his shoes; now, as he wriggled free of his trousers I saw that he was wearing those preposterous underpants with the pattern of crimson stags. He knotted one end of the rope about his chest, under the armpits. “I’ll go down and have a look,” he said. “Take the rope, Albert. Now, the rest of you. And you over there”—he pointed to one of the timber-fellers who was the heaviest man in the village tug-of-war team “—you be anchor man. So! Pay her out steady, Albert, and when I give the word, haul with a will!” (He was remembering his old days aboard the Olaf Trygvesson.) Then he was over the edge, and lost in the darkness of the well. We paid out the rope foot by foot. After a few seconds I heard an echoing splash, and the rope went slack. I shouted over my shoulder: “Hold on, you fellows, for God’s sake!” and then, after what seemed a very long time, George Oaks’s voice came booming hollowly: “Haul up there, haul up, now—with a will. Now! Not tomorrow!”

  We pulled with all our might against a ponderous dead weight, and at last George Oaks appeared, carrying the limp body of Monty Cello over his shoulder. We dragged them out, a
nd on to the path. Oaks’s shirt was torn, and the china-white skin of his breast was torn and bleeding where the rope had bitten in; but Monty Cello’s face was horribly distorted and hideously smeared with a mixture of blood and slime.

  “Better get to work on him quick,” Oaks gasped. “He was head-down, knocked out cold. Get a doctor, hurry!”

  Barnes ran to the telephone, while we laid Monty face-down on the lawn, with his forehead resting on the backs of his hands. Then George Oaks went to work on his back, above the kidneys, rhythmically squeezing the water out of his lungs. Major Chatterton said: “Hadn’t we better get that money-belt off him? Isn’t it in the way?”

  “How did this happen?” I asked.

  “Haven’t the foggiest,” said Chatterton, but Sir Peter Oversmith grunted:

  “Extr’ordin’ry thing! Chatterton ’n I out shooting this morning——”

  “—I arrived late last night,” said Major Chatterton. “Dropped in on the way back to the house to say hello to you.”

  “Exactly,” said Sir Peter. “Brought you a brace of damned fine birds. Got more than I know what to do with.” He pointed to a game-bag, which he had dropped, with his gun, on the threshold of the back door. “Opened the gate. Said ‘How-d’ye-do.’ And damme if this fellow didn’t jump down the bloody well!”

  “That’s right, Mr. Kemp,” said Mrs. Rose. “I came out to draw some water, and the poor gentleman was talking to Jim Barnes on this very spot where I stand. Wasn’t you, Jim?”

  “Doctor’s coming,” said Barnes, coming out of the house. “Yes, Nancy; that’s right, sir. The gentleman was asking me about roses—about how did you grow ’em and what did it cost, and all that. When Nancy came out to draw a pail o’ water the gentleman said: ‘I’ll do that’——”

  “—He called me ‘Momma’!” said Mrs. Rose. “When I took him his breakfast he called me ‘Baby’!” and she began to cry, wringing her big brown hands.

  Barnes said: “ ’E said: ‘I never ’andled one o’ these things before,’ and sent down the bucket, pleased as Punch, like a kiddie wi’ a toy. Then Sir Peter and this other gentleman come in at the gate, and this other gentleman says ‘Good afternoon’ and that poor gentleman jumps like ’e’s been stung, spins around, steps back sudden-like, and stumbles over backwards. I tried to grab ’im, but I was just too late. ’E grabbed the rope and caught it too, but the rope broke and that rotten old woodwork snapped, and down ’e went. I ’eard ’im catch ’is ’ead a crack and then ’e was gone. Oh dear me!”

  At this point the doctor arrived. He looked at Monty Cello’s eyes, put a stethoscope to his chest, and said: “I’m afraid he’s dead.”

  A bloated bluebottle settled on a sticky red patch above his left ear. I covered his face with my handkerchief and, on an impulse, straightened his coat. He had dressed himself in his handmade jacket of English fabric, guaranteed to last a lifetime. It was pitifully soiled now. “. . . Over my dead body,” he had said. And there it was, a messed-up coat, over his dead body.

  The men took off their hats. Barnes said: “If you don’t mind my saying so, doctor, I reckon the poor gentleman ’ad a ’eart attack. The instant afore ’e fell ’e clapped ’is ’and over ’is poor ’eart like ’e’d been stung there.”

  (When they undressed Monty Cello, they found that he was wearing an empty holster at his left armpit; and later, workmen cleaning the well brought up a .32 revolver on a .38 frame, and a diamond-studded medallion of St. Christopher on a broken golden chain.)

  A sharp smell of burnt flesh came to us through the open window of the kitchen. “Oh Lord, my pie!” cried Mrs. Rose, and ran indoors, still weeping, wiping her eyes on her apron. Then we carried the corpse of Monty Cello into the little back room on the ground floor, laid him on an old leather sofa, and covered him with a sheet. Hobson, the constable, arrived at last, bicycle-clipped at the ankles, brandishing a notebook, and was sent to the kitchen to take down the witnesses’ statements, while Major Chatterton and Sir Peter came with Oaks and me for a whisky and soda in the sitting-room.

  “Most extr’ordin’ry thing,” said Sir Peter, wiping his moustaches with a red bandanna. “Say ‘Good afternoon’ to a man, and he jumps down a confounded well!”

  Major Chatterton said: “I’m frightfully sorry, Kemp, but really! . . . Who was he, if I may ask?”

  “An American tourist,” I said. “Fellow by the name of Cello. I scarcely knew him. Met him for the first time last night, as a matter of fact, in the Savoy.”

  “Can’t be too careful who you pick up nowadays—only goes to show,” said Sir Peter. “Chance acquaintances, eh, Chatterton?”

  Then George Oaks astonished me by saying, with admirably over-acted off-handedness: “Well, he wasn’t exactly a chance acquaintance, you know.”

  “Oh, you knew him, George?” Chatterton asked.

  “In a manner of speaking, we were what you might call ‘pen pals’,” said Oaks, “Cello and I. He was quite a character, Cello. He knew all about circuses, and so forth. We’d hoped to have some interesting talks with old Cello, didn’t we, Albert?”

  “It’s a damned shame,” I said. “You must have frightened him, Chatterton, coming up behind him like that.”

  It was not difficult to visualise that death-scene. “Good afternoon” says the beautifully modulated, faintly sneering, hateful voice of the Major; and Monty Cello turns to face the corpse-man and the wild-boar-man, and their shotguns. I could almost feel the last wild leap of the dead man’s heart.

  Chatterton said, earnestly: “I give you my word, George, that I didn’t know Monty Cello from Adam.”

  “That’s right, his name was Monty!” cried Oaks. “I never mentioned it. How did you guess?”

  Another man would have hesitated before replying: not Chatterton. He said: “Cello isn’t a common name, and I seem to recollect having read something or other about somebody called Monty Cello in one of those Hollywood rags when I was last in California. A name like that sticks in your head, you know. If you’d said the man’s name was Durante, or Crosby, I’d most likely have christened him Jimmy or Bing. . . . Monty Cello, you say? He must have been quite well known, then?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Oaks. “I read a bit about him in a Hollywood sheet, the same as you did, I daresay, and dropped him a line. He was working, at that time, for Sam Feinlight, wasn’t he?”

  Chatterton shrugged: “I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t possibly remember. It’s odd about names, isn’t it? I remember once when I was looking for the telephone number of a chap named Opfer, I happened upon the name Op de Beek, and, d’you know, I couldn’t get that name out of my head for years. I still wonder who and what Mr. Op de Beek is or was. Curious, what? . . . Anyhow, it’s an awful bore for you, Kemp. I suppose you’ll have to fuss about with his papers and things, and send all his stuff back to his relatives, and so on and so forth.”

  “Oh, the police will deal with all that, I suppose,” I said, taking my cue from Oaks and speaking with exaggerated carelessness. “What do you think, George?”

  “Oh, just so, just so, Albert . . . By the bye, Chatterton, you mentioned something about poor Cello’s money-belt. I think we’d better take it off, and get his papers out of his pockets before they get spoiled.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” I said.

  Oaks rose, grotesque in one of my dressing-gowns. “I’ll come with you if you like,” said Chatterton.

  “Oh, that’s all right, I can manage alone,” said Oaks. Nevertheless, Chatterton followed him into the little back room. When they returned, in a minute or two, Oaks was carrying Monty Cello’s body-belt, wallet, and passport. He said: “The passport’s pretty wet, but the belt doesn’t seem to have taken much harm—it’s one of those tricky affairs with an oilskin lining. You are the master here, Albert. Shall we open it?” His lips framed a sil
ent No.

  I said: “It’s probably stuffed with dollars. I wouldn’t want to take the responsibility. If it’s money, water won’t hurt it. Any letters or other loose papers inside the wallet or passport, George?”

  “Not a thing, Albert. Better dry this stuff off, though. And look here—I can still feel the chill of that damned well; it went right through me. Be a good fellow, Albert, and put a match to that fire, will you?”

  “Wouldn’t you rather warm yourself out in the sun?” I asked. “Mrs. Rose’ll raise hell about fires in August.”

  “To hell with hell! Give me a match, will you? And let’s have another drink. I don’t feel too bright all of a sudden.” He took my lighter and touched the flame to the loose paper in the fireplace. It caught immediately and burned brightly. The twigs began to crackle and I caught a whiff of sweet, pungent smoke. “Now we can dry poor Monty Cello’s stuff off here, and you can lock it in your desk until the police take charge of it.”

  The constable came out of the kitchen, closing his notebook and brushing cake crumbs off his moustache. “Well, sir,” he said to me, “that’ll be all, for the present. The ambulance is here from the Cottage Hospital to take the deceased away, if that’s all right with you, Mr. Kemp.”

  “The sooner the better,” I said.