"Varek believes in Revolution, you know. A time of turmoil and disruption is what he needs; it gives him an opportunity to profit by confusion. New and untried leaders arise, and he comes to them with hints of what he can do. He presents plans and attempts to gain control of those who form governments.
"We returned to Russia, and I aided him. I had no choice. It was that or lying in darkness - refrigerated darkness, now, thanks to modern conveniences." She smiled wryly. "You can guess what he's been up to since then. You can guess who was behind the scenes in some of Pavlov's experiments. Varek reached members of that group. You can guess that sooner or later the Comintern got wind of it. But what you do not know - and what history does not show - is just how perilously close Russia came to developing a truly mechanized army in the 1930's. An army of the dead!"
I lit a cigarette and tried not to look at the clock on the bureau; the clock that was ticking the minutes away.
"We were in Germany, then, and Varek attempted to sell his notion to the New Order. But his spokesmen fell out of power, and in 1939 we fled again. We were in Canada for a few years, in Manitoba and further north. Varek waited out the war. But he has infinite patience, infinite cunning.
"He can afford to wait - wait for centuries, if necessary. He's a strange man, Varek. He has possessed vast wealth, and lost it time and time again fleeing from country to country. He has a chameleon-like ability to alter his personality his appearance. He is - But what's the use of telling you? You're doomed."
I crushed out the cigarette.
"Now let's get down to cases," I suggested. "He sent you to kill me. Why?"
"Because you know about Cono. His offer was genuine, at first. He is still looking for a man, for many men, who will serve him as living allies. But you refused, and because you understand his power, you must die."
"Yet, Cono is such an insignificant cog in his machine," I persisted. "A dumb strong-man from a carnival. I can't see why a man with Varek's gigantic plans would bother with such a trivial matter."
"Then you don't know Varek. He has plans within plans. He's not lived quietly for the past few years for nothing. He's been waiting - waiting for the next war. The big one. The one his plans have indirectly fomented.
"There's a great laboratory set up already, somewhere in Sorora. It is capable of… processing… the dead almost on a factory assembly line. Its services will be offered to the highest bidder when the time comes. Whichever side runs out of manpower and needs a new army of workers, a new army of fighters. Don't you understand? That's where it all leads to, Varek's dream; to create a world run by slaves - by the dead!"
"He'll never get away with it."
"I'm not so sure. The past few years have brought the scientific developments he needs. There are new methods of controlling bodies en masse. Radio, electronics, blood plasma all play a part in his schemes.
"For years now he's been in the background, waiting for the right time. When war comes he will have emissaries ready to approach the new leaders. He knows how to get to the wealthy, the powerful, and intrigue them. That has been my job in the past. He intended to have your help, too - and probably the help of a hundred men like you."
"That's the one point that isn't clear to me yet," I told her. "Just exactly how does he manage to insinuate himself into the confidence of the men on top?"
Vera smiled. The ghost of a smile, the smile of a ghost. "Simple. Have you ever heard of the Fox sisters? Or D. D. Home or Angel Annie or Madame Blavatsky?"
I nodded. "Spiritualist mediums or mystics, weren't they?"
"Yes. During my… sleep… Varek was able to hit on that gambit. The same one used earlier by St Germain and Cagliostro. Through the ages the wealthy, the powerful have always had one weakness. A belief in superstition. A longing to pierce the veil of the Mysteries. They've always followed the seers, flocked to the occultists, confided in them. No need to explain the phenomenon. It exists."
"True enough." I said. "So Varek allies himself with the mediums. They act as his front men. They attract the rich. And Varek watches, waits, chooses those he wants or can use, and then steps into the picture and reveals his plans."
"Exactly." Vera sighed. "It was that way with Rasputin, if you remember. He was the key to the Czar's influence. And he's ready to start again."
"But the mediums aren't trustworthy, many are frauds," I argued.
"And many are not. Take D. D. Home, for example. No less a scientist than Crookes verified the fact that Home levitated himself out of a third storey window and floated back in through another. It actually happened, time and time again. But what Crookes didn't know is that little, tubercular, wan Mr Home had been dead for a year - and Varek animated him, hypnotized him, and then levitated him by concentration. Just as he levitated me tonight and sent me to kill you."
Vera paused. I stared at her white face in the gloom. And as I stared, something happened. A spasm contorted her countenance, the same dreadful tic that had afflicted Cono. I watched her as her mouth opened and a voice came out. But it was not Vera LaValle's voice. It was the voice of the dead bartender, the voice of Varek.
"Yes," it told her, as much as it told me. "I sent you to kill him. And you failed. Failed and then talked. I cannot afford to have you talk any more, Vera. I'm going to turn you off. Forever."
The voice shut off abruptly. It had to shut off, for there was no longer a means of utterance. The spasm in Vera's face swept down over her body in a single hideous horripilation. For a moment she swayed there, shuddering convulsively. Then - she melted.
There was a change, and it wasn't a collapse. It was a running together, as though flesh were falling in on splintering bone. She shrank, dwindled before my eyes - and then she crumbled.
Somebody had taken the wax doll that was Vera LaValle, and held it over a roaring flame. In an instant she ran together, fused.
I stared at the floor, stared at the heap of fine white ash surrounding a charred and twisted cluster of wires linked to a metal plate.
Vera LaValle was gone.
Vera was gone and I was alone in the bedroom. Or was I?
If I'd had any doubts about Varek's power, they were gone now. They'd vanished with Vera, and taken a part of my sanity with them.
Let's face it; I was panicked. Varek knew where I was, and that meant I would no longer be safe here. Not safe from him, not safe from the police. I wondered what had happened to Ahmed. For all I knew, Varek had attended to him, too. And I couldn't stick around and wait.
I went over to the door. It was locked, of course, and I'd have to force it. I gave it the old college try. You see them do it every day in the movies and on television. Brawny, broad-chested hero puts his shoulder to the locked door. The door gives way. Simple.
Try it sometime. Desperate as I was, all I managed to gain was a bruised shoulder. Then I picked up a chair. That was a better deal. The panel splintered. I broke the lock.
Then I was running down the hall in darkness, groping at the head of the stairs, clumping down them, racing through the hall to the front door. If a cleaning woman had showed up, she didn't show.
I made the door, opened it. The night air hit me. So did a hand.
"What's the rush, friend?"
I gasped with panic, then with relief.
Ahmed bustled in, rubbing his hands. "Hold it," he said. "I've got news for you."
I shook my head. "I've got news for you, too," I said.
"What do you mean?"
I decided to risk it. He had to be shown. I took him by the arm and steered him back up the stairs. If you think it wasn't hard for me to force myself into that room again, you've got another guess. But it had to be done that way.
"Take a look," I said.
His little gray eyes examined the charred ashes on the floor. He stooped and picked up the metal plate, contemplated the dangling wires protruding from it.
"What's this?"
"All that remains of Vera LaValle. She visited me with a knife. I got
her to talk and then she was… shut off."
"I don't follow you."
"Sit down," I sighed. "I'll have to explain, but I want to make it fast."
I did. The Great Ahmed nodded. He wasn't upset, he wasn't alarmed, he wasn't horrified. Somehow, his very calmness managed to reassure me.
"It ties together," he said, as I concluded. "It fits. Every bit of it."
"How do you know?"
"Because I've seen Cono. You were right about the hotel, friend. He came back. And when he found me hiding in the closet he tried to kill me." Ahmed smiled and help up a skeleton key. "I needn't tell you how I got in the room," he grinned. "But to make a long story short, the same thing happened as must have happened to you and Vera here. I managed to calm him down - he recognized me, of course. To be brutally frank, I resorted to an old Varek trick; a little hypnosis of my own. Varek must have been directing his own energies elsewhere, possibly to levitate Vera LaValle.
"At any rate, Cono talked, Of course, he's newly reborn, as it were, and he doesn't have too many details. Also, he's not the best example of a scientific mind." Ahmed smiled, briefly. "Still, he told more than he thought he was telling.
"Did you know that Varek has hideouts established in almost every principal city in the world? And that each of them contains anywhere from a dozen to several hundred bodies under refrigeration, ready for reanimation at any time? A sort of dead storage.
"Also, there are the walkers. More of them than you'd suspect. Although it's really quite easy to detect them because they all have one thing in common - the red scar on the neck."
I started at that. "You mean, he cuts off their heads before he revives them?"
Ahmed shrugged. "Not completely, now. But an operation is performed. A deep incision is made at the base of the brain. The metal plate is grafted into place and the wires" - here he picked up the charred mass from the floor and waved it - "are put into place. Meanwhile, the hypnotic control is being established."
"It's a form of hypnotism, then? But I don't get it."
The Great Ahmed shook his head. "It isn't easy. But then, what do any of us understand about the life process? We don't know what governs our physiological continuity; makes our hearts beat and our lungs take in and expel air without conscious control. You might say we operate our own bodies through autohypnosis and that keeps us alive.
"And what's death? Various organs 'die' at different times after the heart stops. We can understand the process of decay, but we can't define or truly measure death. Why, I defy anyone to tell me exactly what sleep is, let alone death!
"Sleep - that's a form of hypnosis, too.
"And, somehow, Varek has harnessed that portion of the mind which functions automatically in life, in sleep; kept it going in the state we describe as death. The common denominator is electrical energy; brain-waves, which can be measured electrically, you know. Varek has managed to apply hypnotic principles to the electric current of the body; magnetism controlling magnetism. That's why he performs the operation, inserts the metal plates in the brain and the spine. To alter the 'hookup', you might say."
The little man spoke earnestly, as though he were lecturing a backward pupil. I listened with equal earnestness now as he waved his finger at me.
"Let me put it simply. You might compare the human body to a radio set, and Varek to a radio station. His operation consists of putting in the proper tubes and condensers to make the set forever receptive to his hypnotic wave-length. It's all electrical. Once control is established, he can broadcast impulses forever. That's a vast oversimplification, but you get the idea."
"Not completely," I said. "What about the bartender?"
"Oh, there are exceptions. The bartender was one. There Varek resorted to a temporary hook-up. Probably gave his entire concentration to animating him temporarily, just to talk to you. As he concentrated entirely to levitate Vera. Those special things require special efforts. But with the vast army of dead, Varek - to return to our little analogy of a radio station - merely sends out a host of previously prepared 'transcriptions' in the shape of hypnotic suggestions. The dead then 'play' the hypnotic suggestions through for hours. And Varek need pay no more attention to them than an engineer who puts on long-playing records for broadcasting. They operate automatically.
"And that, of course, is the weakness. Sometimes Varek doesn't pay attention; or he watches the wrong body. Then it's possible for someone else with a stronger hypnotic wavelength to 'jam' reception in a corpse - capture its attention, divert its purpose. As I did with Cono tonight at the hotel. And as you did with Vera."
"Lucky for both of us we did," I said. "But what else happened? What else did you find out? Why is Varek operating in Chicago now? And - this is the jackpot question - what's the secret of his own eternal life?"
The Great Ahmed smiled. "You want a lot for a few hours' work, friend," he answered gently. "Some of those questions you'll have to find out about for yourself. All I can do is give you that opportunity."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning I made a deal with Cono. And I think he can be trusted - as long as Varek doesn't get to him. Cono has promised to lead you direct to Varek himself tonight."
"Now?" I was genuinely startled.
Ahmed glanced at his wristwatch. "In about three quarters of an hour. You're to meet him in the lobby of the Wrigley Building at eleven-thirty. Alone."
I didn't like that at all, and he could see it even before I spoke. "What's the big idea?" I asked. "Why aren't you coming along?"
The little man returned my gaze with unmoved composure. "For a very obvious reason; it might be a trap. Then Varek'd have both of us. As it is, you'll have to take your chances. And if anything does go wrong, I'll still be able to carry on, to follow through. After all, that's why you hired me. And I aim to finish the job."
He was silent for a moment. "Think it over," he said. "You don't have to go, you know. And I don't mind telling you I'd hesitate before taking such a risk."
I nodded. "Somebody's got to do it," I said. "So if you'll call a cab for me…"
Ahmed smiled and held out his hand. "Good boy," he said. He turned and led the way downstairs. He phoned for a cab in the hall.
"I don't know where you're going or what you'll get into," he mused. "And of course, under the circumstances, you can't have the cops tagging along. You'll just have to use your head. Try and keep in touch with me, tip me off what's going on and what to do."
"Why don't you follow me in another cab?" I suggested. "Then, no matter where Cono takes me, you'll at least have the address."
"Good idea." Ahmed stepped to the phone and put in another call. Then he nudged me. "And here's a little idea of my own," he said.
He held out his hand next to my pocket and dumped something cold and hard. I reached for it and came up with a.38 fully loaded.
"Just in case," he told me. "I'll feel better if you have something along for company."
I grinned my gratitude as we walked out of the door of 43 East Brent and waited for the cabs to arrive. Mine rolled up first, but his turned the corner a moment later.
"Let's go," he said. "Be careful now."
"Same to you," I answered. Then, "Wrigley Building," I told the driver. And we were off.
It was a nice, warm, moonless night. I leaned back in the cab as we jolted downtown and tried to relax. I'll give you three guesses how well I succeeded.
We kept stopping at corners, corners with cops on them. I hid my face and thanked my lucky stars there was no moon.
When we hit Chicago Avenue and a red light, I took a long chance. I leaned out of the cab, yelled at a newsboy, and bought a paper. Just idle curiosity. I wanted to see if they had my picture in today. With some of the latest gossip. Such as the offering of a reward, dead or alive.
I riffled through the pages rapidly, but no success greeted my efforts. Maybe they didn't care. Maybe they were used to killing bartenders in Chicago.
Killing -
The li
ttle squib caught my eye. With the Louisville dateline. James T. Armstrong Shows… Louis Preusser, 43… Confessed murderer of… Psychiatrists declared under influence of hypnosis and drugs…
It was the follow-up on the story of Louie's confession. He'd walked in, glassy-eyed, and confessed. I wondered what the whole deal was. The Great Ahmed would know. Maybe I'd better ask him before I went on.
I glanced behind to see if his cab was trailing mine. Nothing was in sight. Maybe his driver had taken Clark Street instead. He'd catch up to me. Nobody seemed to have any trouble at all catching up to me whenever they wanted to.
Take Vera LaValle, for instance. She'd found me at the Great Ahmed's after I'd been there for less than an hour. That was one question I needed an answer for. How did she - and Varek - know I was there?
I'd remember to ask Ahmed that.
But - would he tell me?
Maybe you're a scientist, a great scientist. Maybe you're a sorcerer too, a wizard. You can raise the dead, and you stay alive yourself. But it's still quite a trick to pick one person out of four million and send a killer right to his door. Unless somebody tips you off.
The tipoff That was it.
Ahmed goes out. Ahmed sells out. Of course! He went to the hotel, just as he said he would, with the eight grand in his pocket. Maybe he saw Cono there, maybe he saw somebody else. Maybe he even saw Varek himself. And he made a deal. He told Varek where I was. Varek sent Vera to kill me.
When enough time had passed, Ahmed came back to see if the job was accomplished. It must have surprised him to find me alive.
So he came up with the story about meeting Cono. Why? It hadn't, come to think of it, sounded too good at the time. This business about winning Cono over with hypnosis. And Cono leading me to Varek.
But seeing me alive, he'd told me the story for a purpose. Ahmed was a great guy for purposes, all right. He must even have given me the gun for a purpose.
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