by Kim Newman
West 74th Street is one Carmody compartment. The Lower East Side is another – though it wasn’t somewhere I’d killed. The Red Knife struck all over the city, at a type rather than in a location. Correlations matter, not mere proximity. I could make a string of offerings in one room, so long as the placements were proper. I foresee a future – 1984 or 2002, say – when jet-travel is commonplace and I can overlay my grand red design on the map of a country or a continent. Even the globe. Eventually, maybe, in a future of space rangers and rocketmen… across the constellations.
After our discussion, Finlay and Dwight went back to their office. I said I’d work up a dossier on the Switchblade Stabber. They left me with photstats of police reports on the attacks so far, and copies of the criminal records of the victims. Depositions made to the Senate Sub-Committee on Juvenile Crime, including the testimony of battle-scarred Father Molloy, helped fill in the picture. I considered the make-up of New York street gangs in anthropological detail. After spending time with documents, I had an itch to see the hunting ground for myself. I had my calls transferred to the answering service and gave Charmaine the rest of the day off. After pausing for a tiny ritual – nodding three times to Hecate – I shut up my office and went downtown by cab, bus and on foot.
I wore a Chicago winter coat, fetched from the depths of the closet. I don’t stoop to disguises. A good, old coat and a nondescript hat are all I need. You don’t fit in, but don’t stand out either. Ask me the time or panhandle me for a dime… and five minutes later you’ll do it again without remembering you already hit me up. I have one of those faces. And a gift from the goddess – an inner fog-generator that, as the radio programme says, ‘clouds men’s minds’.
All slums smell alike. Folks who can’t or don’t wash enough, rotten fish or vegetables, the stink of opened bowels or veins. People on these streets have the same look as people in Whitechapel in 1888 – mostly busy, hustling to make rent or the next meal, but with the odd still, watchful, superior type. Panderers and footpads, once… now, pimps and hoods. And policemen – always policemen. Gangsters and cops have the same stare. This is their territory and they guard it, prepared to repel boarders. Waves of immigrants mean different languages on the streets, many shades of skin colour, squabbles and prejudices always on the point of turning nasty… but also intermarriage, assimilation, that famous melting pot.
The last war here was between Vampires and Dragons.
Now, there were more gangs, clubs and splinter groups than a sociologist could keep track of. Our new friend, though – he was well-informed. The Counts, the Blades, the Shillelagh Boys and the Hoppers were Polish, Puerto Rican, Irish and Negro. They fought over a few city blocks. Grown-up crime was monopolised by Jews and Italians… but the established, complacent mobs were starting to lose ground to upstart crews with sharper knives and newer ideas.
In Whitechapel, I was the cause of an unprecedented truce. Mobs who’d been killing each other for over a hundred years found common cause with the hated peelers… and set out to find and stop me. You know how that worked out. By 1891, when I did it all over again – using the underground railway to extend my design across the whole city – the gangs were back to cutting each other’s throats and coshing fools who nipped into the wrong pub. For all the fuss made about the Ripper, almost no one – except Guy Hollis’s deluded father – even noticed the repeat performance three years later.
I did a tour of the current crimes. Five sites. Five stabbings.
On the map, an inelegant grouping – these were attacks of opportunity, not offerings at altars. On the ground – narrow alleys, gaps between tenement houses, a junk lot, a trash area behind a bar.
It was like coming home. Part of me is drawn to these anonymous places. By day, they were busy… but the stabbings were after dark. There must have been witnesses. There always are in crowded quarters like this. But this fellow was quick, didn’t need to take his time. Only one of his attacks was botched. I figured people saw him strike, well away from working streetlamps, but didn’t realise what they’d witnessed.
The gangs were all over. Knots of youths, lounging on street corners, smoking cigarettes, combing their hair, cat-calling girls, slapping each other, playing cards or knife games. Different colours for different factions. The Counts had black leather jackets and motorcycle boots, though few owned bikes or cars – if they needed wheels, they stole them. The Blades wore colourful silk jackets and drape pants with thin-brimmed hats and parakeet ties. They were growing prosperous – if you wanted dope, you bought it from them. The Hoppers, poorer and less numerous, made do with blue jeans, white t-shirts and army surplus coats. The Boys wore the green, if unobtrusively, and clustered around businesses – bars, machine shops, stores, a church hall – run by older brothers or parents. They put up a show of force but were eager to move off the street and into warm offices, to count rather than collect the money, to go into politics and the big-time rackets. Like the Jews and the Italians.
A lot of kids were reading comic books published by Sheldon Loesser and his competitors. An observation which might have interested Dr Hofstedtler, though it went against the prevailing tide of his research, was that crime and horror comics were popular but as many toughs read funny animal or costumed adventurer books. The pundit found it harder to work up rage against those, though a chapter of The Pied Pipers of Perversion explored the notion that the adult-hero-and-young-sidekick relationship typified by Batman and Robin peddled pederasty to the masses. Loitering all day is a spur to reading of all kinds. I saw Blades comparing their haircuts to Tony Curtis’s in movie fan magazines, boys of all ethnicities devouring the latest Mickey Spillane and a Hopper halfway through a library copy of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons.
The files on the victims listed items found on their person at the time of death. I wondered if the bland category ‘reading matter’ meant comic books. It could as easily refer to newspapers, motorcycle magazines or Pulitzer prize-winning novels of yesteryear.
Was the Switchblade Stabber an addict of Annals of Crime? He was certainly pitching for a ‘Ghastly – But True’ feature.
Evening came on. Market carts pushed off and sweatshops let out. More people on the streets. An easier crowd to hide in. Cooking smells seeped from the tenements. Radios and gramophones gave the factions their own musical accompaniment – sentimental songs for nose-slitting young warriors.
I walked casually, talked to no one, bought nothing, didn’t linger.
My bargain with Hecate isn’t just for a long life and clean complexion. I have other senses, acquired or developed in the dark. It’s how I found Abner Polk.
I cast about for the Switchblade Stabber.
Was he near?
He must be tall. Strong. Practised and precise, despite the slip with the Talking Head. In the prime of life. Not previously known to the police, unless for something trivial… Some start with animals or self-harm, or indecent exposure, even arson or trophy-theft. Killers of women filch brassieres or stays from clotheslines… what might a killer of teenage hoodlums steal? Gang colours, combs, emblems, weapons? Older than his victims, but with status among them. A perceived neutral. Molloy fit my profile perfectly, but two of the Stabber’s victims had been put down after his shooting – which he’d survived, being a tough old mick. A beat cop? A patrolman might get kids off the main street with a shake-down or an arrest or an interrogation, then strike.
Tino Muñoz was no help – he was hazy about the circumstances, and described ‘an old guy with a nice voice’. To a seventeen-year-old, an ‘old guy’ could be in his twenties or thirties. And what was a ‘nice voice’? I didn’t think to send Finlay and Dwight after George Sanders.
The rumour-mill suggested the Ripper was a policeman, a mad surgeon, a butcher, or a midwife. The public, and Queen Victoria, wanted him to be a foreigner. A Chinese hatchet man, a demented lascar, a Hottentot cannibal with filed teeth. An American, even…
Free-form noise and scented
smoke leaked out of a basement club on Delancey Street. A new cultural enclave. Places like this were more common uptown, or in the Village. Another of my compartments – John Carmody, bohemian. I was comfortable around sculptors with beards and berets, lady poets with matador pants and sunglasses after dark, prose writers who didn’t use punctuation or apostrophes, and visionaries who scratched celluloid strips and projected the results like movies. A few might aspire to be my patients. Not that they wanted to be cured. Under the shadow of the H-bomb, they clung to craziness like an umbrella. It made them creative.
I slipped into the joint just as a guy in a Hawaiian shirt finished a monologue accompanied by two cats on bongos and an alto sax. He shut up but the music loped on, asymmetric and atonal and, like, crazy, man…
There was a press of people. I was pushed against a wall papered with pages from HIC comics, lumpy with paste. The Morgue Meister, the Dread Druid, Commander Planet and the others were there, over and over, images from the reverse of the pages leaking through. Guillotined magicians’ assistants… bug-eyed monsters from Planet Weird… that pressed-flat coat-presser… that shrunken head shrink… GI Guts spilled over atolls and beaches and numbered hills… neck-snapped Harlem squealers in mail-bags… vampires and dragons versus Vampires and Dragons… public enemies cut down by G-men with tommy guns… one-page riffs to appease the post office… the red red Red Knife, cutting commie throats… black men in oversized coats hanging from lamp-posts surrounded by chanting hooded fiends… ads for physical education, x-ray specs, American seeds and hypnotists who could cure a stammer or introduce you to girls. All the images bled into each other. The compartment walls were breaking down.
Too many people here were smoking stuff that wasn’t strictly tobacco.
I was fixating on the comic-book panels.
Click. The Carmody in charge, the king of the compartments, took over.
This wasn’t a Stabber haunt. Not yet. These non-conformists were a group, not a gang.
I withdrew, but the comic-book collage stuck in the mind. It was like one of my designs on a map.
A labyrinth, like the streets round here.
As if by free association, I went from the basement club to a waste-ground. Blades and their girls danced to mambo music. They ignored me. This was a mating ritual, not a sacrifice.
Then, I found a cinder-block building on Ludlow Street. New and ugly, like a military outpost in just-conquered territory. A free clinic. They had them in Whitechapel too. I recognised the address. Tino Muñoz had been brought here, though there was nothing to do for him but call an ambulance. The place was busy with cuts and bruises.
A thirteen-year-old, green ribbon pinned to his jacket, bawled like an infant as a nurse washed a long cut on his arm, which had gone through his sleeve to the meat. He wasn’t hurt seriously enough to let inside. The sister wore whites and had a starched hat perched in her bottle-blonde perm. She must have been forty, but still in the game. Not a nun.
‘You hurt, mister?’ she asked me.
She was the first person in the neighbourhood to notice me watching. I almost revised my thinking. A nurse would have to be strong, might be trusted enough by gang kidettes, could get behind and above with a switchblade.
If she wore a man’s suit and hat, could a nurse be ‘an old guy with a nice voice’?
It was unlikely to be that easy.
I shrugged and said nothing. The woman got back to her patient.
‘We’ll get ’em back, Sean,’ said an older youth, also green-ribboned. ‘The hunkies it was. We’ll get ’em back.’
The nurse cuffed Sean’s friend and told him not to be any more of a fool than God made him.
‘Here,’ she said, after the job was done, producing a lollipop from a pocket, ‘get this in your gob to shut you up. And go home, you little idjits.’
She let the bandaged wonder be hauled off and went back inside.
I wondered what her name was and sidled up to a shingle that listed the staff.
She was either Miss Maire O’Connell, APN, or Mrs Bridgit Cohen, RN.
…but those names faded. Another leapt out.
Psychiatric Case Worker – Dr Reuben Hofstedtler, APsaA, APA, NYPSI, M.D., et cetera.
I whistled.
* * *
The next morning, Joseph Mapp – a Hopper – was listed as the Stabber’s sixth.
Finlay brought the news to my office. He and Dwight went over the reports every day, winnowing out the Stabber’s doings from general routine carnage.
Mapp was found dead two streets from the clinic, face down in a copy of Crack of Doom. From mugshots, I recognised the boy I’d seen engrossed in The Magnificent Ambersons. I wasn’t sure I believed his eclectic tastes in ‘reading matter’. The cops had hauled in Sean Hogan (of the slit sleeve) and his brother Michael and were grilling them lightly. I could have told the police the Irish boys’ beef was with ‘hunkies’, not Mapp’s coloured gang, but wasn’t keen on admitting I’d been there. If you’re seen at the sites of murders, people get ideas…
…no, it would not be hilarious to get away with 138 murders over sixty-five years, then get pinched for crimes I didn’t commit. It was the sort of nasty turn Sheldon Loesser used too often. In the horribly moral world of the comics, merciless cosmic justice undid the wrongdoer. Why didn’t Dr Hofstedtler notice the square crime-does-not-pay messages? In the real universe, Hecate rewards her devotees.
Mapp was killed after midnight, when I was back in my apartment. The murder could not be said to have been committed ‘under my nose’. But had I been noticed? We watch, we predators. We are perceptive. If our friend had seen me but I’d not seen him, he was more dangerous than I’d assumed. The nurse? Someone in the beat club? An invisible old Jewish or Italian guy?
Surely, there couldn’t be another moon-worshipper in the city? From the evidence, the ritual was all wrong. But evidence could be partial, or not looked at from the right, skewed angle. I needed to do more research. Behind respectable shelves of psychiatry journals and text-books, I keep arcana like Prinn’s Mysteries of the Worm and Balfour’s Cults of Ghouls. The occult is another of my compartments.
Finlay showed me stark crime-scene photos. That’s how I noticed the Crack of Doom issue. It had fallen flat, so the cover was splayed out – a leprous drooling creature, splattered with Joseph Mapp’s real blood. If Reuben Hofstedtler needed a shock image for the jacket of a sequel to The Pied Pipers of Perversion, this was a shoo-in. That made me wonder whether that wasn’t the whole point of the stabbings. Someone might be making Hofstedtler’s case for him, more forcefully than a syndicated radio broadcast.
Should I share my tentative idea with Finlay? It was a long-shot.
I couldn’t see the elderly, bespectacled Dr Hofstedtler striking down teenage toughs, no matter how many anatomy charts he studied. Still, he cropped up all over this story. His crusade was in the news while the Senate Sub-Committee was in session. He might have disciples. Also, and this gave me shivers, the doctor was younger than me. I, of all people, shouldn’t underestimate the physical capacity of an educated man.
I put Mapp’s crime-scene photo on my desk and lined up similar shots from the other stabbings.
‘What do you see?’ Finlay asked.
‘Nothing yet,’ I said.
But there they were. Annals of Crime. Morgue of Horror. Crack of Doom. Dick Squad. Stuck in jacket or jeans pockets, crumpled up and lying around, sometimes just a torn page. The police hadn’t made the connection. Comic books were everywhere, after all. So were gum wrappers and newspapers and used bus tickets and handbills for local businesses. I could probably find those at all the death scenes too.
Hofstedtler’s big theory was that comics turn kids into killers… but the upshot of the Stabber’s work seemed to mark kids who read comics as murder victims. Acts like these have personal meaning – blessed be the Goddess of the Crossways – to the perpetrator. This was something to do with the funny books.
Finlay
looked at the same photographs. He kept going back to Mapp.
‘This isn’t how he fell,’ said the special agent, at last. ‘He’s been shifted… you can see where the scuff-marks are. His head has been placed on the magazine. Like a pillow.’
‘It’s not a magazine,’ I prompted.
‘Oh yes, I see. A comic book. Kids’ stuff. Looking at them dead and going over their rap sheets, you forget how young they were. Mapp was fifteen. This monkey has got to be stopped, John.’
I agreed with Special Agent Finlay.
* * *
The Mid-Town offices of High Integrity Comics were above Loesser & Son’s print works. Mendel Loesser, originally a printer, lost clients in the 1930s when bund lobbyists persuaded some companies not to use ‘Jewish firms’ to run off cracker packets and candy wrappers. He turned publisher to keep his presses rolling. Comic books were even cheaper to throw together than pulp magazines. The sickly kids who wrote and drew them knew less than wordsmiths about contracts, rights and payments.
Thanks to the circumstances of HIC’s origins, their first heroes – the mysterious Moon Mask, the mesmeric Madame Violet, and two-fisted Doc Gargantua – fought Nazis well before America entered the war. The adventurers rose to popularity on a wave of patriotic bloodthirstiness. Mostly retired now, the numbering of their books continued. The fee for registering a new title doesn’t have to be paid if an old comic just changes its name and direction. Morgue of Horror begun as Moon Mask Mysteries in 1938 and had been Moon Mask Funnies, Moonlight Romance and Moon of Horror along the way. Madame Violet was now Annals of Crime. The former cover star still hosted a backup feature about murderesses, ‘Deadly Dames and Dastardly Dolls’.
This was my first visit to my patient’s workplace. It was like stepping from one compartment to another.
I introduced myself to Loesser’s secretary, an old stick who didn’t have Charmaine’s curves. Beyond a wood-and-frosted-glass partition, her boss cackled like the Morgue Meister. The secretary let me pass without a grilling. I found Loesser and a smartly dressed young man poring over artwork in which an old gent with thick glasses was getting throttled by his own beard, which had turned into a writhing nest of snakes. Sheldon Loesser, a quivering wreck on my couch, was a confident dictator in his own realm.