by Otto Penzler
“Well, at any rate you knew him better than anyone else, or at all events longer. Something’s come up, but I can’t discuss it on the telephone.”
When I got to Whitehall I found three other men with Blake-Smith: Paul Gavin the criminologist, ex-Inspector Dowd, and, to my astonishment, the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Maturin. Everything was hedged about with protocol and hush-hush, but it was only that they were all at sea, and no wonder. When one of your most distinguished foreign agents is found murdered in his own house under circumstances that absolutely defy logic, you keep it quiet—that is, you do if you are the British Government.
“You knew him and his family, and you are a psychiatrist,” said Viscount Maturin heavily. “That is why we have asked you to come here. We would like you to tell us about the son.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because he couldn’t possibly have done it.”
The facts as they were explained to me (Dr. Moore continued) were as follows: Dander had arrived on a P. & O. liner at the beginning of March and went to the Wanderers Club, where he spent the night. The next day was the day I saw him here, during which he arranged to have the Manchester Square house opened, and called up Sandhurst to get the details of Jonathan’s escapade.
The headmaster had little to say: to him the outré was un-English and therefore unspeakable. It appeared that during class Jonathan had unexpectedly gone mad. The history master had mentioned Dander Senior’s fine war record, as a possible incentive to improve study on the part of the son, and Jonathan had rushed at him.
That in itself was bad enough, particularly as the history master’s beard was nearly torn out by the roots. But worse was to follow.
Jonathan escaped from some kind of impoundment later, only to be discovered fingering a Winchester in the rifle room. Dander went and got him that evening.
The way in which the house in Manchester Square was opened up is important. Dander had cabled his lawyers from Aden to hire cleaners and so on to make the house ready for him, and then to clear out. This is not so remarkable as it might seem when I tell you that he had had the place renovated—at least, on the inside, to the most complete modernism. I don’t mean the decor, but everything from central heating to heat-resistant windows, from a water-cooled roof to an incinerator in the cellar. Dander had what he called a machine for living. Also he had put in metal-sash windows and foolproof locks.
A young woman was engaged to come in the mornings to wash things and make the beds, but nothing else. She turned up the first morning and left immediately, terrified by the “dreadful shouting from the two gentlemen upstairs.” She never returned.
The next thing we heard was that Dander cut every appointment he had made—at his club, at his lawyer’s, and, what was more important, at the Foreign Office. Then the milk bottles began to arrange themselves in sour ranks in the areaway, and the postman could no longer stuff anything into the overfilled mailbox on the front door. The London policeman is not too eager to break into the house of a rich man, and the lawyers had had a taste of his fury at any interference. But this case was different.
The search of the premises was instigated by Whitehall. To break in, they smashed a basement window—the doors were metal-lined, and you will have to take my word for it that nothing was overlooked, and that every precaution was taken. Every possible exit that a man could use was locked on the inside; all front and basement doors were barred on the inside, and in such a way that it could not have been done from the outside. No one got out after the investigators entered, and no one was found in the house except Petrus Dander.
They found him face down on his bed upstairs, in two portions as it were. On the pillow his head, and a little farther away, the rest of him. The house was searched, and no clue turned up except the heavy Crusader’s ax which had cut off Dander’s head, and the ax was found in the cellar, stained brown and flecked with his iron-gray hair. Perhaps I should mention the empty bottle of sleeping pills, but that was something Dander had taken for years. Still, it was a possible clue—but to what? What was needed wasn’t clues but logic—and there was none.
Now you may wonder why the authorities made such a careful entrance. It was fear—fear of repercussions on the part of the Police, and fear of entanglements on the part of the Foreign Office. They had not expected to be faced with the impossible—and yet a man was dead in a place from which his murderer could not have left, and yet the murderer was no longer there.
I have a little hobby, which is topology, and I had recently published an article on the Jordan curve theorem in the magazine Situs. Thinking to liven up my piece, I made the analogy of a man in a maze with no openings; but here was a case that seemed to make nonsense of what I wrote. Suicide was out of the question, and decapitation had been the sole cause of death.
So I wrote a letter to Situs saying I had somehow made a mistake, although I did not yet understand precisely what it was. And yet implicit in my mistake was the solution.
Rid your mind of any idea that the searching party made any slips: let me just assure you that when I was taken to the Manchester Square house I convinced myself that the facts were exactly as I have told them to you; and subsequent findings have proved them to be true—absolutely true.
When I wrote my recantation to Situs they managed to get it into the next issue, which was on sale by the next Monday morning. The result was electrifying. Viscount Maturin was waiting for me at his office, to which I had been summoned in the early afternoon, and there was a cabinet minister with him.
“We asked you not to speak of it,” Maturin said coldly. “Why did you write that letter in Situs?”
“But I said nothing to connect it with the case!” I said. “Besides, who reads the magazine?”
“The War Office reads it, and the connection was obvious. The point is that to the Power that engineered the murder—”
“If I may interrupt,” interrupted the cabinet minister, “we do not actually know whether it was done by a Foreign Power.”
“My dear Charles,” Maturin said, “what we know is neither here nor there. But we must have some reasonable public excuse for believing that the son did it. Otherwise there’ll be a bloody mess.”
They both looked at me accusingly and expectantly.
“I don’t see why,” I said finally, “it should be any easier for a nation than for an individual to do the impossible.”
“Look at the Pyramids,” said the cabinet minister.
I said, “Anyway, what has to be done is to revise our concept of the impossible.”
“Is that all you have to offer?” said Maturin.
“Well, somewhere in my subconscious is the recognition of a design, and that design includes the son.”
“I trust, Doctor, that you will be able to bring it out into the conscious.”
“I must have the answers to some questions,” I said, “and then I will have to go over the Manchester Square house again—with you, and preferably at once.”
To get the answers to my questions we had to go through a lot of records, but I learned nothing that I did not already know. At Dander’s house the three of us started at the top, and my examination of the attic ceiling astonished Maturin. “This has been gone over a thousand times, my dear Moore! No one could possibly have got out, so what are you looking for?”
I shrugged—the truth is, I didn’t know. In Dander’s bedroom I stood staring at the ceiling again. “There’s no sign of anything having hung there,” I said, half to myself.
“If you mean the ax,” Maturin said, “if you’re thinking of some kind of booby trap, how did the ax get to the cellar? That’s where it was found.”
“I don’t know,” I said lamely. “Let’s take another look at it.”
In the cellar the ax had been pushed to one side, but its original position was marked in chalk on the cement floor. I looked at the childishly drawn outline—a possible scrawl on a pavement came to my mind, Jonathan hates Petrus … My eyes began
to go over the floor.
“If you’re thinking about tunnels,” said Maturin, “we have already—”
“I am not thinking about tunnels,” I said. “I usually look at the floor when I’m thinking. I did it as a child whenever—” I stopped, and realized suddenly that I knew the answer.
“It was suicide,” I said.
Maturin looked at me as though I had gone mad, and sat down on the cellar stairs. “How can a man behead himself and then—” He stopped.
“There’s only one possible place for it,” I said, and went to the incinerator and opened it.
“Place for what?” Maturin snapped, and then came over with a flashlight, which he shone into the dark interior. “All the doors and windows were locked or barred on the inside, so it makes no difference what Jonathan burned up!”
“That’s what I thought,” I said, “before I wrote the letter to Situs.”
There was a long silence while I pieced together my thoughts. Then I told them this:
“There was a man who could not bear to be thought small and of no account. He knew he was exceptional, but eventually he found that another was standing in his way, and the woman he loved was more drawn to this other, and by links she did not know nor would have liked to recognize. He pretended rage to himself at this, but underneath this rage was guilt—for the hate he felt made him guilty. Guilt drives a man to a lower hell than hate.
“He had tried to conquer this, but he was fighting the invincible, and he made, over and over again, the futile gesture of running away—of removing himself from this impossible triangle. Then the woman died, and although the triangle no longer existed, he was still trapped—and he must kill his adversary to escape. I do not think he consciously planned what he did, but in the depths of his mind it must have been there all the time.
“He was brought here to this house, by a bullying overbearance which made things worse than ever. They reviled each other all night, and he followed his father up to the bedroom. I am talking of Jonathan, of course—in love with his mother, murderously hating his hateful father, and crawling with a guilt so strong that he had attempted suicide, as we know, at least twice. Once by hunger strike and then, after his attack on the bearded history master by rifle—for the history master was to him a symbol of his father’s authority.
“Petrus Dander lay face down on the bed, exhausted by argument and alcohol, but before lying down he took his usual dose of the sleeping pills. Knowing him, I can imagine one last and unbearable taunt coming muffled by the pillow—a taunt perhaps referring to Jonathan and his mother. And Jonathan looked at him … You cannot move a black mark on paper, but you can erase a black mark.
“Jonathan went down to the library and picked out the most suitable of its military relics—one that may have looked to him like an executioner’s ax. No doubt he felt very noble until the spasmodic contraction of the body separated it from the head. Then he saw the bottle of sleeping pills, and took them all—like a little boy taking medicine as a punishment. And then he realized that only one of his adversaries had been removed, that the nasty medicine was not enough.
“Jonathan cast away the empty bottle, and trailing the ax came down here to the cellar, as the sleeping pills began to cut off, bit by bit, his sensory system.
“Later, when you searched, you all looked for the murderer—a man. And you say he could not have got out of the house. That was your mistake—not realizing that you were absolutely right.”
Maturin stared at me. “You say we were right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Right in saying he could not have got out—but wrong in thinking that because a man was no longer in a place he must have got out.”
I reached into the incinerator. Then I turned, and held out a handful of ashes, which Maturin and the cabinet minister looked at uncomprehendingly.
“Jonathan timed it precisely. Just before he succumbed to the sleeping pills, he turned on this very up-to-date incinerator, and climbed into it. He was totally unconscious before it began to heat up, and dead long before it consumed his body and turned itself off.
“You see, you were looking for a man—not for his ashes.”
NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE
ONE OF AMERICA’S most famous illusionists, Clayton Rawson (1906–1971) was a member of the American Society of Magicians and wrote on the subject frequently. Born in Elyria, Ohio, he graduated from Ohio State University and worked as an illustrator for advertising agencies and magazines before turning to writing. He used his extensive knowledge of stage magic to create elaborate locked-room and impossible-crime novels and short stories. Under his own name, all his fiction featured the Great Merlini, a professional magician and amateur detective who opens a magic shop in New York City’s Times Square. There, he often is visited by his friendly rival, Inspector Homer Gavigan of the NYPD, when Gavigan is utterly baffled by a seemingly impossible crime. Merlini’s adventures are recounted by freelance writer Ross Harte. There are only four Merlini novels, two of which have been adapted for motion pictures. Miracles for Sale (1939) was based on Rawson’s first novel, Death from a Top Hat (1938). In this film, the protagonist is named Mike Morgan, played by Robert Young; it was directed by Tod Browning. The popular Mike Shayne series used Rawson’s fourth book, No Coffin for the Corpse (1942), as the basis for The Man Who Wouldn’t Die (1942), with Lloyd Nolan starring as Shayne, who consults a professional magician for help. The other Merlini books are The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939), The Headless Lady (1940), and The Great Merlini (1979), a complete collection of Merlini stories. Under the pseudonym Stuart Towne, Rawson wrote four pulp novellas as Don Diavolo. The author was one of the four founding members of the Mystery Writers of America and created its motto: “Crime Does Not Pay—Enough.”
“Nothing Is Impossible” was first published in the July 1958 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in The Great Merlini (Boston, Gregg Press, 1979).
CLAYTON RAWSON
ALBERT NORTH had looked forward to retirement. An early pioneer in aviation design and the founder of Northair Corporation, he had promoted himself to Chairman of the Board and turned the active management of the company over to his son-in-law, Charles Kane.
A week later he was bored, irritable, and unhappy. He had been much too active for too long. He turned a small room off the study in his Fifth Avenue apartment into a workshop and, for a while, made airplane models. This was better than lying in the sun at Miami but it still didn’t satisfy him.
Then he found a hobby that ran away with him. It was a curious hobby, and a magazine editor whom I queried agreed that there was a story in it. At first I intended to give it the light touch, but after listening to North talk for a couple of hours I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t know if he was pulling my leg or fooling himself, or if I had stumbled on the biggest story in the history of journalism.
I decided to get some expert professional advice. And I knew just where to go to find out if any deception was involved—a place that sold the very best grade in quantity lots. I walked into The Great Merlini’s Magic Shop just at closing time.
The proprietor was totaling the day’s receipts and he was not in a good mood. He had covered several sheets of paper with mathematics and had failed to find out why he had $3.17 more cash on hand than the register total showed. In view of the fact that he designed, performed, and sold miracles, his annoyance at this situation was understandable.
“Obviously,” he growled, giving the cash register a dark look, “that machine needs overhauling.”
Since the shiny gadget he referred to was the latest IBM model, installed only the week before, I thought this conclusion somewhat unlikely. Not being an electronics engineer, however, I didn’t say so. “What,” I asked instead, “do you know about flying saucers?” I didn’t really expect to surprise him with that; he’s a hard man to surprise. But I certainly didn’t expect the answer I got.
“Would you like to see our de luxe model—the one with invisibl
e, double-action suspension and guaranteed floating power?” His straight face and deadpan delivery didn’t fool me; I’d met that technique before.
I shook my head. “I know. You sell rising cards and floating ladies, and the Levitation section of your catalogue offers a couple of dozen methods of defying gravity, but don’t tell me—”
The Great Merlini pointed to the neatly lettered business slogan on the wall behind the counter: Nothing Is Impossible. “You should know by now, Mr. Harte,” he said, “that anything can happen here. Come with me.”
He led me into the back room that serves as workshop and shipping department. I threaded my way through a maze of milk cans (for escaping from), walked around a guillotine (guaranteed to be harmless), and saw Merlini pick up a tin pie plate from the workbench.
“This is just a test model,” he said. “But it works.”
He scaled the plate across the room. Instead of falling to the floor with a clatter, the spinning disk acted as if it had a built-in boomerang. Maintaining a constant five-foot altitude, it curved through a 180-degree turn and sailed back toward Merlini. He grinned, stepped aside, and let it go past. I ducked, it skimmed over my head outward-bound again, and continued to circle the room, spinning steadily and utterly ignoring everything Sir Isaac Newton had ever said about gravitation.
“There’s nothing very new or original about this,” Merlini explained as he reached out and caught it. “If you ever saw the Riding Hannefords in the circus ring, you saw Poodles Hanneford do exactly the same thing with his derby hat. The secret—”
“Don’t tell me,” I objected. “It’s probably so simple I’d feel like a dope for not having seen it instantly. But who ordered a flying saucer? Are you doing a mail order business with Mars?”
“Television,” Merlini said. “When a TV space opera script calls for something that baffles the combined efforts of the special effects department and electronic cameras, then they call on me.”