The Origin of Evil

by Ellery Queen

  "Is that so?"

  "Mr. Priam, we know the whole story."

  "What whole story?"

  "We know your real name. We know Leander Hill's real name. We know where you and Hill came from before you went into business in Los Angeles in 1927, and what your activities were before you both settled in California. We know all that, Mr. Priam, and a great deal more. For instance, we know the name of the person whose life was mixed up with yours and Hill's before 1927—the one who's trying to kill you today."

  The bearded man held on to the arms of his wheelchair. But he gave no other sign; his face was iron. Keats, watching from the sidelines, saw Delia Priam sit forward, as at an interesting play; saw the flicker of uneasiness in old Collier's eyes; the absorption of Macgowan; the unchanging smile on Wallace's lips. And he saw the color of life creep back in Laurel Hill's cheeks.

  "I can even tell you," continued Ellery, "exactly what was in the box you received the morning Leander Hill got the gift of the dead dog."

  Priam exclaimed, "That's bull! I burned that box and what was in it the same day I got it. Right in that fireplace there! Is the rest of your yam going to be as big a bluff as this?"

  "I'm not bluffing, Mr. Priam."

  "You know what was in that box?"

  "I know what was in that box."

  "Out of the zillions of different things it could have been, you know the one thing it was, hey?" Priam grinned. "I like your nerve, Queen. You mast be a good poker player. But that's a game I used to be pretty good at myself. So suppose I call you. What was it?"

  He raised a glass of whisky to his mouth.

  "Something that looked like a dead eel."

  Had Ellery said, "Something that looked like a live unicorn," Priam could not have reacted more violently. He jerked against the tray and most of the whisky sprayed out on his beard. He spluttered, swiping at himself.

  As far as Keats could see, the others were merely bewildered. Even Wallace dropped his smile, although he quickly picked it up and put it on again.

  "I was convinced from practically the outset," Ellery went on, "that these 'warnings'—to use the language of the original note to Hill—were interconnected; separate but integral parts of an all-over pattern. And they are. The pattern is fantastic—for instance, even now I'm sure Lieutenant Keats still suspects what Hollywood calls a weenie. But fantastic or not, it exists; and the job I set myself was to figure out what it was. And now that I've figured it out, it doesn't seem fantastic at all. In fact, it's straightforward, even simple, and it certainly expresses a material enough meaning. The fantasy in this case, as in so many cases, lies in the mind that evolved the pattern, not in the pattern itself.

  "As the warnings kept coming in, I kept trying to discover their common denominator, the cement that was holding them together. When you didn't know what to look for—unlike Mr. Priam, who did know what to look for—it was hard, because in some of them the binding agent was concealed.

  "It struck me, after I'd gone over the warnings innumerable times," said Ellery, and he paused to light a cigaret so that nothing in the room was audible but the scratch of the match and Roger Priam's heavy breathing, "it struck me finally that every warning centrally involved an animal."

  Laurel said, "What?"

  "I'm not counting the dog used to bring the warning note to Hill. Since it conveyed a warning to Hill and not to you, Mr. Priam, we must consider the dead dog entirely apart from the warnings sent to you. Still it's interesting to note in passing that Hill's series of warnings, which never got beyond the first, began with an animal, too.

  "Omitting for the moment the contents of the first box you received, Mr. Priam," Ellery said, "let's see how the concept 'animal' derives from the warnings we had direct knowledge of. Your second warning was a poisoning attack, a non-fatal dose of arsenic. The animal? Tuna fish, the medium by which the poison was administered.

  "The third warning? Frogs and toads.

  "The fourth warning was one step removed from the concept—a wallet. But the wallet was leather, and the leather came from an alligator.

  "There was no mistaking the animal in the fifth warning. The ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes—The Birds.

  "And the sixth warning, Mr. Priam—some worthless old stock certificates—would have given me a great deal of trouble if you hadn't suggested the connection yourself. There's a contemptuous phrase applied to such stocks by market traders, you said—'cats and dogs.' And you were quite right—that's what they're called.

  "So . . , fish, frogs, alligator, birds, cats and dogs. The fish, frogs, and alligator suggested literally, the birds and the cats and dogs suggested by allusion. All animals. That was the astonishing fact. What did you say, Mr. Priam?"

  But Priam had merely been mumbling in his beard.

  "Now the fact that each of the five warnings I'd had personal contact with concealed, like a puzzle, a different animal—astonishing as it was—told me nothing," continued Ellery, throwing his cigarette into Priam's fireplace. "I realized after some skull work that the meaning must go far deeper. It had to be dug out.

  "But digging out the deeper meaning was another story.

  "You either see it or you don't. It's all there. There's nothing up its sleeve. The trick lies in the fact that, like all great mystifications, it wears the cloak of invisibility. I do not use the word 'great' loosely. It's just that—a great conception—and it wouldn't surprise me if it takes its place among the classic inventions of the criminal mind."

  "For God's sake," burst out Crowe Macgowan, "talk something that makes sense!"

  "Mac," said Ellery, "what are frogs and toads?"

  "What are frogs and toads?"

  "That's right. What kind of animals are they?"

  Macgowan looked blank.

  "Amphibians," said old Mr. Collier.

  "Thank you, Mr. Collier. And what are alligators?"

  "Alligators are reptiles."

  "The wallet derived from a reptile. And to which family of animals do cats and dogs belong?"

  "Mammals," said Delia's father.

  "Now let's restate our data, still ignoring the first warning, of which none of us had firsthand knowledge but Mr. Priam. The second warning was fish. The third warning was amphibians. The fourth warning was reptiles.

  The fifth warning was birds. The sixth warning was mammals.

  "Immediately we perceive a change in the appearance of the "Warnings. From being an apparently unrelated, rather silly conglomeration, they've taken on a related, scientific character.

  "Is there a science in which fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals are related—what's more, in exactly that order?

  "In fact, is there a science in which fish are regarded as coming—as it were—second, amphibians third, reptiles fourth, birds fifth, and mammals last?—exactly as the warnings came?

  "Any high school biology student could answer the question without straining himself.

  "They are progressive stages in the evolution of man."

  Roger Priam was blinking steadily, as if there were a growing, rather too bright light.

  "So you see, Mr. Priam," said Ellery with a smile, "there was no bluff involved whatever. Since the second warning, fish, represents the second stage in the evolution of man, and the third warning, amphibians, represents the third stage in the evolution of man, and so on, then plainly the first warning could only have represented the first stage in the evolution of man. It's the lowest class of what zoologists call, I believe, craniate vertebrates— the lamprey, which resembles an eel but belongs to a different order. So I knew, Mr. Priam, that when you opened that first box you found in it something that looked like an eel. There was no other possibility."

  "I thought it was a dead eel," said Priam rigidly.

  "And did you know what the thing that looked like a dead eel meant, Mr. Priam?"

  "No, I didn't."

  "There was no note in that first box giving you the key to the warnings?"

 
; "No..."

  "He couldn't have expected you to catch his meaning from the nature of the individual warnings themselves," said Ellery with a frown. "To see through a thing like this calls for a certain minimum of education which— unfortunately, Mr. Priam—you don't have. And he knows you don't have it; he knows you, I think, very well."

  "You mean he sent all these things," cried Laurel, "not caring whether they were understood or not?"

  The question was in Lieutenant Keats's eyes, too.

  "It begins to appear," said Ellery slowly, "as if he preferred that they weren't understood. It was terror he was after—terror for its own sake." He turned slightly away with a worried look.

  "I never did know what they meant," muttered Roger Priam. "It was not knowing that made me ..."

  "Then it's high time you did, Mr. Priam." Ellery had shrugged his worry off. "The kind of mentality that would concoct such an unusual series of warnings was obviously not an ordinary one. Granted his motive—which was to inspire terror, to punish, to make his victim die mentally over and over—he must still have had a mind which was capable of thinking in these specialized terms and taking this specific direction. Why did he choose the stages of evolution as the basis of his warnings? How did his brain come to take that particular path? Our mental processes are directly influenced by our capacities, training, and experience. To have founded his terror campaign on the evolution theory, to have worked it out in such systematic detail, the enemy of Leander Hill and Roger Priam must have been a man of scientific training—biologist, zoologist, anthropologist .., or a naturalist

  "When you think of the stages of evolution," continued Ellery, "you automatically think of Charles Darwin. Darwin was the father of the evolutionary theory. It was Darwin's researches over a hundred years ago, his lecture before the Linnaean Society in 1858 on 'The Theory of Evolution,' his publication the following year of the amplification of his 'Theory' which he called On the Origin of Species, that opened a new continent of scientific knowledge in man's exploration of his own development.

  "So when I saw the outline of a naturalist and accordingly thought of Darwin, the greatest naturalist of all, it was a logical step to think back to Darwin's historic voyage—one of the world's great voyages on perhaps science's most famous ship—the voyage of naturalistic exploration on which Darwin formulated his theory of the origin of species and their perpetuation by natural selection. And thinking back to that produced a really wonderful result." Ellery gripped the back of a chair, leaning over it. "Because the ship on which Charles Darwin set sail from Plymouth, England, in 1831 on that epic voyage was named . . . H.M.S. Beagle."

  "Beagle." Laurel goggled. "The dead dog!"

  "There were a number of possibilities," Ellery nodded. "In sending Hill a beagle, the sender might have been providing the master key which was to unlock the door of the warnings to come—beagle, Darwin's ship, Darwin, evolution. But that seemed pretty remote. Neither Hill nor Priam was likely to know the name of the ship on which Darwin sailed more than a hundred years ago, if indeed they knew anything at all about the man who had sailed on it. Or the plotter might have been memorializing in a general way the whole basis of his plot. But this was even unlikelier. Our friend the scientifically minded enemy hasn't wasted his time with purposeless gestures.

  "There were other possibilities along the same line, but the more I puzzled over the dead beagle the more convinced I became that it was meant to refer to something specific and significant in the background of Hill, Priam, and their enemy. What could the connection have been? What simple, direct tie-up could have existed among a naturalist and two nonscientific men, and the word or concept 'beagle,' and something that happened about twenty-five years ago?

  "Immediately a connection suggested itself, a connection that covered the premises in the simplest, most direct way. Suppose twenty-five years or so ago a naturalist, together with Hill and Priam, planned a scientific expedition. Today they would probably use a plane; twenty-five years ago they would have gone by boat. And suppose the naturalist, conscious of his profession's debt to the great naturalist Darwin, in embarking on this expedition had the problem of naming, or the fancy to rename, the vessel on which he, Hill, and Priam were to be carried on their voyage of naturalistic exploration . ..

  "I suggested to Lieutenant Keats," said Ellery, "that he try to trace a small ship, probably of the coastal type, which was either built, bought, or chartered for purposes of a scientific expedition—a ship named, or renamed, Beagle which set sail from probably an American port in 1925 or so.

  "And Lieutenant Keats, with the co-operation of various police agencies of the coastal cities, succeeded in tracing such a vessel. Shall I go on, Mr. Priam?"

  Ellery paused to light a fresh cigaret.

  Again there was no sound but the hiss of the match and Priam's breathing.

  "Let's take the conventional interpretation of Mr. Priam's silence, Lieutenant," said Ellery, blowing out the match, "and nail this thing down."

  Keats pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and came forward.

  "THE NAME OF the man we want," the detective began, "is Charles Lyell Adam. Charles Lyell Adam came from a very wealthy Vermont family. He was an only child and when his parents died he inherited all their money. But Adam wasn't interested in money. Or, as far as we know, in women, liquor, or good times. He was educated abroad, he never married, and he kept pretty much to himself.

  "He was a gentleman, a scholar, and an amateur scientist. His field was naturalism. He devoted all his time to it. He was never attached to a museum, or a university, or any scientific organization that we've been able to dig up. His money made it possible for him to do as he liked, and what he liked to do most was tramp about the world studying the flora and fauna of out-of-the-way places.

  "His exact age," continued Keats, after referring to his notes, "isn't known. The Town Hall where his birth was recorded went up in smoke around 1910, and there was no baptismal record—at least, we haven't located one. Attempts to fix his age by questioning old residents of the Vermont town where he was born have produced conflicting testimony—we couldn't find any kin. We weren't able to find anything on him in the draft records of the First World War—he can't be located cither as a draftee or an enlisted man. Probably he got some sort of deferment, although we haven't been able to turn up anything on this, either. About all we can be sure of is that, in the year 1925, when Adam organized an expedition bound for the Guianas, he was anywhere from twenty-seven to thirty-nine years old.

  "For this expedition," said Keats, "Adam had a special boat built, a fifty-footer equipped with an auxiliary engine and scientific apparatus of his own design. Exactly what he was after, or what he was trying to prove scientifically, no one seems to know. But in the summer Of '25 Adam's boat, Beagle, cleared Boston Harbor and headed down the coast.

  "It stopped over in Cuba for repairs. There was a long delay. When the repairs were finished, the Beagle got under way again. And that was the last anybody saw or heard of the Beagle, or Charles Lyell Adam, or his crew. The delay ran them into hurricane weather and, after a thorough search turned up no trace of the vessel, the Beagle was presumed to have gone down with all hands.

  "The crew," said Lieutenant Keats, "consisted of two men, each about forty years old at the time, each a deepwater sailor of many years' experience, like Adam himself. We've got their names—their real names—but we may as well keep calling them by the names they took in 1927: Leander Hill and Roger Priam."

  Keats shot the name at the bearded man in the wheelchair as if it were a tennis ball; and, like spectators at a match, they turned their heads in unison to Priam. And Priam clutched the arms of his chair, and he bit his lip until a bright drop appeared. This drop he licked; another appeared and it oozed into his beard. But he met their eyes defiantly.

  "All right," he rumbled. "So now you know it. What about it?"

  It was as if he were grounded on a reef and gamely mustering his forces of surviva
l against the winds.

  "THE REST," SAID Ellery, squarely to Priam, "is up to you."

  "You bet it's up to me!"

  "I mean whether you tell us the truth or we try to figure it out, Mr. Priam."

  "You're doing the figuring, Mister."

  "You still won't talk?"

  "You're doing the talking," said Priam.

  "We don't have much to go on, as you know very well," said Ellery, nodding as if he had expected nothing else, "but perhaps what we have is enough. You're here, twenty-five years later; and up to recently Leander Hill was here, too. And according to the author of the note that was left in the beagle's collar, Charles Lyell Adam was left for dead twenty-five years ago, under circumstances which justified him—in his own judgment, at any rate—in using the word 'murder,' Mr. Priam . . , except that he didn't die and he's here.

  "Did you and Hill scuttle the Beagle, Mr. Priam, when you were Adam's crew and the Beagle was somewhere in West Indian water? Attack Adam, leave him for dead, scuttle the Beagle, and escape in a dinghy, Mr. Priam?

  The Haitians sail six hundred miles in cockleshells as a matter of course, and you and Hill were good enough seamen for Adam to have hired in the first place.

  "But seamen don't attempt murder and scuttle good ships for no reason, Mr. Priam. What was the reason? If it had been a personal matter, or mutiny, or shipwreck as a result of incompetence or negligence, or any of the usual reasons, you and Hill could always have made your way back to the nearest port and reported what you pleased to explain the disappearance of Adam and his vessel. But you and Hill didn't do that, Mr. Priam. You and Hill chose to vanish along with Adam—to vanish in your sailor personalities, that is, leading the world to believe that Adam's crew had died with him. You went to a great deal of trouble to bury yourselves, Mr. Priam. You spent a couple of years doing it, preparing new names and personalities for your resurrection. Why? Because you had something to conceal— something you couldn't have concealed had you come back as Adam's crew.