Death from Nowhere

by Clayton Rawson

  Alexander bent down and pulled at his shoulder to turn him on his face. There was something about that face that—

  One of the man’s arms shot up, snakelike, hooked around Mr. Alexander’s neck, and jerked him forward off his feet in a half somersault.

  Then a brown hand rose swiftly and fell again. Light touched the cold bright steel of the knife it held and made a shining arc in the air.

  The fingers that held the gun stiffened once and then relaxed. A slow red stain moved out across the carpet.

  The brown-skinned man rolled over and got to his feet.

  Don Diavolo

  Woody

  Mickey

  Pat Collins (we think)

  Inspector Church

  Karl

  CHAPTER II

  Guillotine

  A SIGHTSEEING bus filled with out-of-town visiting firemen rumbled through Greenwich Village. The guide, a human phonograph whose voice sounded as if the needle should be changed, lifted his megaphone as they crossed Sheridan Square. He pointed toward a narrow little cul-de-sac of a street, half as wide as it should be and not much longer.

  “Number Seventy-seven Fox Street,” he rattled off automatically, “the third house from the corner. The famous House of Mystery, home of The Great Diavolo, the world’s premier magician and escape artist. And on your left.…”

  It was too bad that the guide couldn’t have taken his passengers down into the basement of number Seventy-Seven Fox Street at that moment. He would have been able to show them a sight far more hair-raising than all the half forgotten tong wars and sham opium dens of Chinatown put together.

  In that basement, surrounded by the intricate machine-shop of tools he loved so well, Karl Hartz was making some final adjustments on a strange and sinister apparatus. His blue eyes gleamed with interested concentration behind their thick-lensed glasses. His waving shock of white hair was rumpled, and there was a large round smudge of grease on the end of his nose.

  He twisted his pipe wrench one final quarter of a turn, took a last careful measurement with a pair of steel calipers, and then stepped back.

  “That should do it, Chan,” he said. “Give her another try…”

  Chan Chandar Manchu, a slant-eyed, brown-skinned, perennially smiling young Eurasian had been hired originally as Don Diavolo’s dresser, but had turned out to be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of most of them. He had long since given up trying to predict what he would be called on to do next.

  This chore that Karl had asked him to help with was one of the queerer ones. But Chan, with the bland acceptance of his Chinese-Indian ancestry, only grinned and bent to turn the great iron wheel before which he stood.

  As he moved it, a heavy ratchet accompanied his turning with a harsh metallic clicking. And, in the foot-wide space between the two tall vertical supports that served as tracks, a broad blade of brightly shining steel moved slowly upward. The blade was surmounted by a heavy weight and its slanted lower edge was razor sharp.

  When the steel knife had reached the top the boy stopped his turning. Karl Hartz ran a careful mechanic’s eye over the apparatus and then reached out and pulled a lever. The great blade dropped.

  Its thin edge cut the air with a sharp whistling swish, and stopped short at the track’s base with a dull and sinister clunk. The pleasant little toy these two were working over with such loving care was nothing less than an altogether too realistic guillotine!

  Karl gave a pleased nod of approval. Chan suppressed a shiver.

  Behind them a girl’s voice asked, “Did you have to make it look so very much like the real McCoy?”

  Karl and Chan turned to see Patricia Collins and Don Diavolo himself just stepping from the electric elevator that had brought them down from the floor above. Pat, along with her twin sister Mickey were the blondes who added beauty and a couple of dashes of sex to the modern sorcery of Don’s innumerable conjuring acts.

  They were the girls who were mistreated in a dozen different ways at each and every performance, sawed in two, burned alive, stuck full of swords, completely obliterated — only to reappear again as good as new half a minute later.

  Don grinned at Pat’s apparent uneasiness and his dark eyes twinkled impishly. “Karl,” he said, “it looks like a bang up job. Too good maybe. Pat here is already threatening to go on strike and picket the place with a placard reading: Don Diavolo is Unfair to Magicians’ Assistants. They Always Get it in the Neck.”

  “But Miss Pat,” Karl said seriously. “I positively guarantee this to be the safest guillotine ever made. It wouldn’t hurt a baby.”

  “But I’m not a baby,” Pat insisted. “What I want to know is what it is going to do to me.” Doubtfully she added, “Just a nice soothing massage on the back of the neck, I suppose.”

  “Not even that,” Karl insisted. “It won’t hurt a bit.”

  Pat was hard to convince. “That’s what the dentist always says just before the fireworks begin.”

  Don Diavolo went forward and gave the machine a thorough, expert examination.

  The magician did not conform to the classic conception of a conjurer as an elderly, wizardish being with a Satanic moustache and goatee. He was, instead, a tall handsome young man with broad shoulders; a lean, tanned, mysteriously engaging face; and black eyes that sparkled with boundless, bubbling energy.

  The constant training that his sensational and seemingly miraculous straitjacket and underwater escapes necessitated had given him the lithe-muscled figure of an athlete, the iron-willed endurance and sure, coordinated poise of the professional daredevil. His broad and somewhat sly grin was irresistible.

  He turned to Pat. “Perhaps you’d better try it on for size,” he said.

  Chan once more bent to the wheel that hoisted the heavy blade, and Pat eyed its ascent like a swimmer contemplating an icy mountain stream on a cold winter day. “Some day,” she sighed, “I’m going to trust you boys too far.”

  She swung up, stretched out on the wooden shelf-like platform, and placed her neck within the hollowed half moon that was directly beneath the blade.

  “I wish Inspector Church were here,” she muttered. “He’d put a stop to this.”

  Don grinned. “He’d have conniptions and put us all behind bars. Okay, Karl?”

  Karl nodded and grasped the lever.

  Don said, “Ready. Aim.” Chan closed his eyes. “Fire!”

  The heavy blade plunged downward with sickening speed and passed, if one could believe one’s eyes, completely through the girl’s neck! Her body was now on one side of the blade, her head on the other. But, because of some strange mechanical magic of Karl’s contriving, it had, quite impossibly, failed to harm her.

  She protested mildly, “It tickles.”

  Don warned her. “Don’t you dare make a crack like that when we’re in front of an audience. It’s supposed to give them thrills, chills and amazement — not a laugh.”

  Chan raised the knife up out of Pat’s neck and she pulled her head back from under its strangely inoperative menace.

  “That reminds me,” she said. “Chan, did Woody phone while we were out? He said he’d try to get tickets tonight for the new show at the Drury Lane, Laugh, Clown, Laugh.”

  Chan nodded. “Yes. He said to tell you that unless somebody got murdered, set fire to the Empire State Building, orbit a dog before presstime, he’d pick you up at seven sharp.”10 Chan turned to Diavolo. “There was a call for you too. You’re to phone Mr. Alexander, Bryant 3-3824. Shall I get it for you?” Chan turned to the phone on a nearby workbench.

  Diavolo frowned. “Alexander?” he said. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “He spoke excellent grade of Hindustani,” Chan said. “Deduced from manner of speaking that he knows you well. He knew my name. Said to tell you he arrived this morning from India and that he had great news. First name seemed to be Ted.”

  “Ted?” the magician said. “India.” His frown deepened. “Alexander. I’m not sure I get it.
That’s all he said?”

  Chan nodded. Diavolo took the phone and dialed the number. “India,” he said again. “Sounds interesting.”

  He heard the voice of a switchboard operator saying, “Hotel Winfield.”

  “Mr. Alexander, please,” he said. Then he waited. Nothing happened. After a moment the girl spoke again. “I’m ringing Mr. Alexander.” And after another moment she said, “Mr. Alexander doesn’t answer.”

  Don Diavolo said, “Thank you. I’ll try again.” He hung up.

  During the next hour quite a lot of things happened — particularly in Room 713 of the Hotel Winfield. But at Seventy-seven Fox Street comparative quiet reigned.

  Don Diavolo and Karl Hartz discussed the technical possibilities of an idea Karl had had for a new version of the Floating Lady. Chan busied himself in his kitchen and Pat went upstairs to break out her evening gown and make preparations for the theater. Mickey came in soon and joined Pat full of a contagious excitement that had something to do with a new hat.

  It was just four-thirty when Chan answered the doorbell and found on the stoop outside the very last person in the world he would have expected to find there — Nicholas Sayre, as large as life and twice as menacing.

  10 J. Woodford Haines, better known as Woody is Patricia’s boy friend and the newspaper reporter whose widely syndicated Behind the Scenes column is famous for its lowdown on inside stories.

  CHAPTER III

  The Devil’s Challenge

  MR. NICHOLAS SAYRE was a crusty, blustering, opinionated old codger with a deep-seated distaste for magicians — especially a certain Don Diavolo. And Nicholas Sayre had never been known to conceal his dislike for anybody or anything for the sake of politeness. He had about as much social tact as a water-buffalo. For some reason there were a lot of people who made no objection to his blustery rudeness. It may have been because he also had five million dollars.

  When Chan came to the door, Sayre looked at him as if he might have been some queer sort of a vegetable growth with spots on it. Then he snorted — like a water-buffalo— and growled, “Is that blasted know-it-all magician in?”

  The imperturbable Chan grinned his bland Oriental grin and said, “Maybe so. Maybe not. I’ll ask him.”

  Then, although he well knew that all the books of etiquette ever written said that a multi-millionaire should never never be left waiting on the doorstep like a Fuller Brush man, Chan closed the door in Mr. Nicholas Sayre’s face and went to report this visitation to his employer.

  He touched a hidden pushbutton on the underside of a small table in the hall and then spoke into the vase of flowers that stood there.

  “Very sorry to report plague of locusts on front door stoop,” he said. “Very surprising phenomenon. His name is Nicholas Sayre.”

  Don Diavolo’s voice came back out of the flower vase. “This wouldn’t be one of those odd Oriental practical jokes of yours, would it, Chan?”

  “No. Most certainly not. Practical joke supposed to be humorous. Visit from Mr. Nicholas Sayre not funny at all. Perhaps you aren’t here now?”

  “You bet I’m here,” Diavolo replied. “When Old Nick walks into our parlor my curiosity boils. Tell the old witch doctor that I’ll be right up.”

  Chan returned to the door, put his neat, polite smile on again and let Mr. Nicholas Sayre in. Because of the wait, Sayre had begun to fume, something, Chan imagined, as Mount Vesuvius does an hour or two before its sulphurous hell breaks loose.

  Another man stepped through after the millionaire, a pale little ghost of a man at whom you had to look at twice before you were sure he was there. He had watery gray eyes and small gold-rimmed spectacles. His somewhat faded, sandy hair had a too neat appearance that suggested a toupee.

  Whenever Sayre growled, “Richards!” the little man jumped. This gave him more or less the appearance of an automatically operated jumping-jack, because Sayre said “Richards!” quite often. He was the great man’s private secretary.

  Mr. Sayre looked around the living room, noticed the framed, autographed photos of Hermann, Kellar, and Thurston on the wall and snorted. He sat down and found himself facing an even larger photo of Harry Houdini. His face turned red as quickly as one of Diavolo’s color-changing handkerchiefs.

  He growled, “Richards!”

  Richards jumped.

  Sayre’s bulky finger pointed at the picture. “Turn that blasted thing around so I don’t have to look at it!”

  Richards looked nervously at Chan, even more nervously at his boss, and then obeyed orders. Chan who, like his compatriots Confucius and Lao-Tze, often made up his own epigrams thought; “Storm clouds very often nothing but hot air.” But he refrained from saying it out loud. He grinned again instead and walked out.

  Nicholas Sayre’s impatience with magicians was understandable if you knew anything about him at all. In spite of the fact that he often acted like a Republican discussing the Third Term, he was a smart man — or, if not that, at least a very clever one. You had to have your wits about you in order to assemble five million dollars all in one bank account starting from scratch as he had done. The trouble with him was that he had a hobby — and, once he had retired from active business life, he rode that hobby for all it was worth.

  It had started innocently enough with a collection of Oriental ceramics, but had gone on from there to an interest and then a deep belief in Oriental philosophy, Hindu Yoga and the Lamaist Buddhism of Tibet.

  This meant that the inside of Mr. Sayre’s mind was filled with a very strange collection of what he insisted were facts. He was quite sure, for instance that telepathy, astral projection, telekinesis, cryptesthesia, and the exteriorization of sensitivity were established scientific truths.

  He practiced seventeen varieties of Yoga breathing exercises every morning before breakfast and he had been properly hooked a couple of times by Indian Swamis and Hungarian telepathists — who had managed to get his autograph on checks made out to non-existent occult societies.

  He disliked Don Diavolo for having proved conclusively a year or two before that the president of a so-called psychic-research society to whom Sayre had made a large donation was using a concealed X-Ray machine to produce his thought photographs. Nothing would give him any greater pleasure than to make Don Diavolo admit, once and for all, that occult phenomena did exist which could not be duplicated by trickery and sleight of hand. Once or twice he had come very near to doing it.

  And this time.…

  He growled as Don Diavolo came in. “Young man, does that ten thousand dollar challenge of yours still stand?”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Sayre,” Don said. “Nice weather we’ve been having, isn’t it?”

  Sayre said, “Mmmmmmfk!” or something that sounded like that, and then, “I didn’t come all the way down here to talk about weather. And you know it. Well, does it or doesn’t it?”

  “If you mean the ten thousand dollars I offered to any medium or other miracle worker who could produce a psychic manifestation I couldn’t duplicate by ordinary means, yes. Does that answer your question?”

  “It does,” Sayre leaned forward. “And this time you’ve got a job of work on your hands. I’ve found the man who is going to collect your money —just like that!”

  Sayre snapped his fingers with a crack that almost made the windows rattle. Richards, over in the corner, jumped again.

  Don eyed Sayre with a show of interest. The old boy might be a bit cracked in one or two departments, but even so he wasn’t exactly easy to fool.

  The other times when he had slipped up, he had been taken by the slickest fakes in the business. Sayre had exposed a good many phony mediums on his own and he knew all the standard makes of spirit hokum.

  “If you really should have the real thing, Mr. Sayre,” Don said, “it would be worth the ten thousand dollars. But it’s going to have to be good.”

  “It is good,” Sayre insisted. “Trouble with you magicians is that you won’t believe the real thing whe
n you do see it. Instead you sit down and try to figure out some blasted black-thread-and-sleight-of-hand hocus pocus that will imitate it. But this time I’ve got a man who can do something that’s going to be damned hard to imitate!”

  “Who is he?” Diavolo asked. “Anybody I know.

  “He’s the greatest student of the occult sciences since Raymond Lully.” Sayre was as enthusiastic now as he had been touchy.

  “He’s a Grand Master of the White Lodge of the Himalayas, and the best tricks you’ve got up your sleeve look like what comes out of a toy magic set compared to the phenomena he is able to produce.

  Shivara

  “His name is Shivara. In the full Sanskrit, Siddahshivara, which in case you don’t know—”

  “But I do,” Don interrupted. “My Sanskrit is a bit rusty, but I seem to remember having read that siddah means a man who possesses supernormal powers. Do you mind giving me just a small preliminary hint as to what to expect — what it is that is so supernormal about Mr. Shivara?”

  Sayre hesitated. He gave the magician a long intent look, and Don, staring back at him, thought he glimpsed something in Nicholas Sayre’s eyes that he had never seen there before.

  He saw it for only a moment and then it was gone again, but he was sure he knew what it was. It looked strangely like fear and, more than that, a touch of pure horror.

  “He can do anything,” Sayre answered slowly. “Anything!”

  Don Diavolo felt a little chill along his own back. This was getting thick. “That takes in an awful lot of territory,” he said. “Let’s take one thing at a time.”

  Sayre nodded. “All right. I’ve seen you vanish that young lady assistant of yours more than once. You put her in a box or cabinet and a moment later she isn’t there. Shivara does that. But he doesn’t need any boxes or cabinets, nor any stages with trick lighting and behind-the-scenes assistants.