A Man Called Milo Morai

by Robert Adams

  O'Shea snorted. "Bejabbers and you're talkin' nonsense, doctor, pure nonsense. It won't be no more wars, not big ones, anyway. We got us the League of Nations and the World Court

  to settle diffrences in Europe. Pres'dent Woodrow Wilson—"

  "Your pardon, Mr. O'Shea," Osterreich courteously interrupted, "but I must say that your vaunted President-of-the-United-States-of-America a true naif was, and used shamelessly by France and Great Britain was to their own, most selfish ends. Nothing his supposed-great deeds accomplished but to sow the seeds of discord and misery and future war for Europe and the world. The so-called Treaty of Versailles was nothing of the sort, Mr. O'Shea, rather was it the ultimate revenge of France for the defeat she in the Franco-Prussian War suffered. Not only did the provisions of that hellish document leave France as the sole large, united, strong and vealthy nation upon the continent of Europe, it sundered, impoverished and thoroughly humiliated two of her historic rivals for hegemony—the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She had no fear of her other two historic rivals, for Britain had been her ally and took her part in all the negotiations, while Russia in utter turmoil was not to be a threat."

  "Legally robbed of eferything of value—ofersea colonies, merchant ships, naval ships, most of the bullion that their monies backed, their heafy industries und mining, denied credit universally und with their monies worthless—the defeated were left with only starvation and despair on national scales. Und just as the despair of millions of Russians bred Bolshevism, Mr. O'Shea, so the soul-deep despair of the cruelly used Germanic peoples has bred its own brand of fanaticism, a variety efery bit as dangerous to individuals and to nations as is the Russian variety."

  "But the true horror of our group, Mr. O'Shea, is that Americans like you seem blissfully unaware of just how close to worldwide war we coming are. This is why the dissemination of our digest so important is, for very few Americans speak any of the languages but English, so necessary it is to translate the other important languages into English, hoping that what they read in our digest will cause them to take from the sand their heads in time."

  Milo's first day of work at the office of Dr. Osterreich's group revealed to him and the others there that he spoke at least two other languages, Ukrainian and Modern Greek, at least six regional dialects of German, three of French and the variant of the Dutch language known as Afrikaans and still spoken only in the Union of South Africa. But that first day also revealed to him that was he to get any meaningful amount of work done each day, it would have to be at someplace other than in that office.

  All of the other eleven men and women in the office had immigrated within the last decade from various European lands. One man and two women were White Russians and were jokingly called "the old non-nobility" because they had been in America longest. In addition, there were an Austrian, two Germans, a Pole, two French ladies, a Hollander and a Neapolitan Italian. Milo had met a few of them before when Osterreich had brought them to his hospital room to try to determine just how well he spoke certain foreign languages with which the psychiatrist, himself, was no more than peripherally familiar, and of course those whom he had not met had heard of him from their coworkers and from Dr. Osterreich.

  The staff all were bubblingly curious, and none of them seemed to believe that he truly could recall none of his past life. The two Russian ladies seemed to firmly believe him to be a Russian nobleman of some degree who had found it prudent to bury his past lest agents of Josef Stalin find and kill him; the Russian man, on the other hand, was working under the firm assumption that Milo was a Trotskyite on the run or possibly a Cossack officer who had left Russia with his regiment's payroll in gold.

  All of the others had their own opinions as to Milo's true identity, most of them wildly speculative if not downright romantic, and they constantly harassed him with questions to the point that he elected to do all future work either at the boardinghouse or in the enforced tranquillity of the public library.

  He soon found the library a good choice, for frequently he came across words in various languages of which he did not know the exact meaning. Reference books and dictionaries available at the library gave him not only the meanings he sought but also seemed to give him something else of a puzzling nature to ponder.

  Chapter II

  "Ach, mein freund Milo, I do not at all odd find this matter," Osterreich said, shaking his head and smiling. "Most of these words and phrases of general conversation are not." He flicked away the list that Milo had meticu-lously written out. "If, as suspect I strongly do, you mastered your multiplicity of tongues through living amongst people of those tongues rather than more formally, it fully understandable is that many modern words and technical terms of narrow usage you would not have learned. Do not to further trouble yourself with regard to such trifles."

  "You are doing good work, very good work, incidentally. The translations are most precise, yet without meaning of the original languages losing. Where do you work? At the O'Shea house?"

  "No," replied Milo, "at the public library. It's always quiet, and there's reference books available there, as well. I tried to do it all at your office, but decided after one day that I'd never get the first article finished in less than a week, not with all the interruptions."

  "What did you tell these people about me, Sam? The Russians think I'm Russian, the French and the Germans seem to think I'm German, and everyone there is clearly of the opinion that I'm lying about my inability to recall my past, that I'm on the run from one government or another, a spy or an international crook."

  Osterreich sighed. "I know, I know, Milo. Of these fanciful suppositions some of them haf broached to me, too. I told them only the truth, that an amnesiac you are following probable neural damage which from a blow to the skull resulted. More recently, of their consummate silliness I haf chided them; how much good my vords to them did, I know not, howefer."

  He sighed again. "I had had hopes that to work around so many people to jog your memories to the surface it might. But this work you do so well is of great importance, and if you do it best alone, so be it."

  "But to other matters: how goes your life at the O'Shea domicile?"

  "The Convent of Saint Maggie?" answered Milo. "That's what the neighbors called it before I moved in, I hear."

  Osterreich wrinkled his brows in puzzlement. "She is so religious, then?"

  Milo laughed. "No, Sam, she had all females in the house, with the sole exception of Pat—two daughters, two or three female servants and five to seven female boarders in residence. The neighbors don't appear to like the idea of a boardinghouse in their neighborhood. I guess they would all have preferred that Maggie sink into genteel poverty rather than manage to survive and hold her own the way she did. She's a fighter, that woman. I admire her."

  "And what of the others, there, Milo? What of them do you think, eh?"

  "Pat O'Shea," Milo chuckled, "if he had his way, would long since have had me and everybody else in the house—excepting only Maggie, his daughters and the servants—in some branch of the armed services, having already gotten both of his sons and one of Maggie's former boarders so persuaded. He keeps working on me, of course, using every excuse he can think of to get me to enlist in the Army of the United States of America. Were you twenty years younger, no doubt he'd have been after you, too."

  "As for the rest of the household, I see most of them only at dinner and, sometimes, at breakfast. Those nurses who work the night shift sleep during a good part of the day, and those who work the day shift, as does Maggie, have to be on the floor at seven a.m. and so leave at a godawful hour of the morning. Fanny Duncan hasn't been around for two weeks now, or nearly that; she's on private duty at the home of some wealthy people up near Evanston, living there to be near the patient at all times."

  "The cook is a widow about sixty, and Irish, like Maggie herself. I've been polishing my Irish Gaelic on her, learning new words… and that brings us back to my list there, Sam. She, the cook, Ro
saleen O'Farrell, says that I speak an Irish dialect that she's not heard since she was a child, in Ireland, and then only from her rather aged grandmother."

  "I had thought that to settle that matter we had, Milo," said Osterreich with very mild reproof in his voice. "Now, what of the other persons with whom you reside?"

  Milo shrugged. "I've met Sally O'Shea but once, and that very briefly; she's living at the hospital, in nurse's training. The few conversations I've had with Maggie's youngest, Kathleen, have been mostly her monologue on a hash of something concerning the subjects she's studying at the University of Chicago. The elder of the two maids is a friendly sort, Canadienne; we chat in French. The other maid hasn't been with Maggie too long, a colored girl from somewhere down South; I don't talk much with her because I have great difficulty in understanding her—they must speak a very odd dialect of English where she comes from."

  Milo's job was better than no job at all, but the income he derived from it fluctuated from two or three dollars a week to, occasionally, as much as twenty or thirty dollars a week, so that all too often he found it necessary to dip into his dwindling hoard of cash from the sale of his gold coins. This would have been bad enough, but he discovered through countings that someone else apparently was dipping in, as well; there never was a large amount missing, no more than ten dollars at a time, but after the third or fourth such occurrence, he invested in a small steel lockbox with a key, a length of log chain, a padlock and a neckchain on which to carry the keys.

  He had bought a well-made box with a good lock of heavy construction, and he was glad he had when he found deep scratches on the face of the lock and marks along the edges of the box resulting clearly from vain attempts to pry open the lid. A few days later, he returned to his room from the library to find the box pulled out from under the iron bedstead to which it was chained and with a few millimeters of nailfile tip broken off in the lock. The removal of this required no little effort and the necessity of borrowing a pair of tweezers from one of his co-boarders, Nurse Irune Thorsdottar. But a week later, he had to borrow them again to extract a short piece of stiff wire from the lock. On that occasion, he confided in Irunn about the problem of the thefts and attempted thefts, and between them they devised a plan to apprehend the thief in the act.

  The tall, broad-shouldered and -hipped woman shook her blond head, her pale-blue eyes above her wide-spreading cheekbones mirroring disgust and anger. "Nothing lower, Mr. Moray, than a sneakthief. I'm not rich, precious few folks are these days, but if a body here was in real need, I'd loan them what I could and I judge you would too, so it can't be no excuse for them to steal or try to steal from one of us. We'll catch the snake, though, count on it."

  Milo and Irunn had, however, to bring one additional person in on their plot, and Rosaleen O'Farrell, upon being apprised of the cause for the scheme, was more than willing. So, on the day Milo left the house at this usual time, bound in the direction of the library, battered secondhand briefcase in hand; and Irunn long since having departed to begin her shift at the hospital, the second floor lay deserted as soon as the maids had finished sweeping and dusting it and moved on to the third floor, whereon two night-shift nurses lay sleeping.

  Cautiously, Milo returned by way of the service entrance and Rosaleen let him up the back stairs, relocking the door behind him, then returning to her work. Safely out of sight behind the closed door of Irunn's room—it being directly across the hall from his own—Milo opened the wooden slats of the Venetian window blind just enough to allow light for reading and settled himself in a chair with a library book to wait and read and listen. Nothing happened on that day, nor on the following two days, and he was beginning to think he was needlessly wasting time better spent elsewhere, but on the Friday, about mid afternoon, he heard footsteps, two sets of them, and a whispered mutter of voices from the hall outside Irunn's door. One of the voices sounded vaguely familiar; the other, deeper one did not.

  Laying the book down soundlessly and gingerly easing out of the now-familiar chair, he tiptoed over to take a stance hard against the wall behind the door to Irunn's spotless, scrupulously tidy room. He was glad that he had positioned himself just where he had when the door was slowly opened enough for some unseen person to survey the room from the hallway, then ease it shut again before passing on to open and view the other rooms on the second floor.

  Only by straining his hearing was he aware of when his own room's door was opened, then almost soundlessly shut. There was another dim, unintelligible muttering of two voices, then a brief rattling as his strongbox was dragged out from under his bed on its chain. He gave the thieves a good ten minutes, during which time there were a couple of almost-loud clanks, half-whispered cursing in a man's voice, another clank, then the commencement of a scraping-rasping noise which went on and on.

  Opening Irunn's room door and then his own on the hinges that they two had carefully oiled at the beginning of this scheme, Milo entered the room to find Kathleen O'Shea, daughter of Maggie, kneeling beside his bed, watching while a black-haired, sharp-featured young man plied a hacksaw against one link of the logchain; the blade had already bitten a couple of millimeters deep into the metal.

  When Kathleen looked up and saw Milo, she shrieked a piercing scream, which caused her companion to start, look up himself and heedlessly gash open a thumb and a forefinger with the blade of the saw. But he seemed to ignore the injury, and, dropping the handle of the saw, he delved his right hand into his pocket, brought out a spring knife and, all in one movement, flicked upon the shiny five inches of blade, rose to his small feet and lunged at Milo's belly.

  Milo never could recall clearly just what happened then or in what order events occurred, but when the blur of motion and activity once more jelled, his assailant sat propped against the neatly made bed, his eyes near-glazed with agony. The young man was gasping loudly, tears dribbling down his bluish cheeks, his right arm cradled in his lap with white shards of shattered bone standing out through flesh and shirt and suit coat, which coat was beginning to soak through with dark blood from that injury as well as from the doubly gashed left hand that supported the injured arm.

  Milo's own shirt was sliced cleanly a bit below his rib cage on the left side of his body, sliced about the length of an inch, and there was blood on his shirt around and below that opening, but he had no time at that moment to examine himself for injuries or wounds, for Kathleen still knelt unmoving in the identical spot she had occupied when first he had entered and apprehended her and her companion in the commission of their crime, and she was still screaming. Peal after peal had been ringing out without cessation, and agitated movement could be heard from the floors above and below, as well as on the stairs.

  Rosaleen O'Farrell was the first to arrive, and her initial action was to take Kathleen by the hair and slap her, hard, with palm and backhand on both cheeks, twice over. That effectively stopped the screaming. The cook's muddy-brown eyes took in the strongbox chained to the wrought-iron bedstead, the hacksaw, the slightly damaged link and the massive padlock from the keyhole of which an ineffective wire pick still protruded.

  "Caught them, did you?" she stated to Milo in Irish Gae-lic. "I knew, I did, it's telling herself I was that no good would come of them dirty furriner boys Kathleen has been bringing into this house. I think that one's the Dutch Jewboy, Jaan what's-his-name, a godless Bolshevik."

  At the shaken Pat O'Shea's insistence, Maggie was rung up at the hospital and summoned home. She was advised, also, that it might be wise to bring a doctor along who was prepared to handle a compound fracture of the lower arm, as well as dislocations of both elbow and shoulder joints, not to mention a case of shock. The two night nurses from the third floor, both wakened by the screams of Kathleen, which had been of a timbre to wake a corpse, had raised the slight, fainting young would-be burglar and would-be knifer onto Milo's bed, removed his shoes and tie, unbuckled his belt, ascertained the full extent of his injuries, then set about trying to slow his loss of
blood, while keeping his feet elevated and his body warm.

  By the time Maggie came puffing across the lawn from Dr. Gerald Guiscarde's motorcar, her plump face nearly as white as her uniform, a few more judiciously applied slaps of Rosaleen's hard hands and a stiff belt of neat whiskey pressed on her by her father had brought Kathleen out of her hysterics to a stage of red-eyed, moist-cheeked snuffling interspersed with shudders, gaspings and swallowings and the occasional horrified stare at the man called Milo Moray.

  But when Maggie entered, Kathleen sprang up and flung herself into the stout woman's arms. "Oh, Mama, Mama, he killed him! He did! Right in front of me! I saw him do it."

  "Stuff and nonsense, Mrs. O'Shea," snapped Rosaleen from where she stood in the archway between front and rear parlors. "The Jewboy ain't dead… yetaways. But it's I'm thinkin' he should be. The little bugtit, he's been sneakin' out money from Mr. Moray's room for weeks, he has, either him or Kathleen, more's the pity. Mr. Moray bought him a lockbox and chained it to the bedstead, he did too, but somebody"—she stared hard at Kathleen as she paused, and the girl flushed and refused to return the stare—"has been tryin' to pick the locks."

  "Mr. Moray and Miss Thorsdottar got together to catch the thief, and fin'ly, today, he did. When he went into his room this afternoon, he found Kathleen and that Jewboy takin' a hacksaw to the chain, set to carry the box away, I'd say, I would, so's they could bash it opened. And when they come to see him, Kathleen comminceted a caterwaulin', while the Jewboy went at poor Mr. Moray with a switchblade jackknife, he did."

  "Poor Mr. Moray, he should ought to've kilt him, but he didn', just busted his arm a wee bit and unjointed his shoulther and elbow, is all. He—"

  "God Almighty damn, Milo!" burst out Dr. Gerald Guiscarde from the foyer, which he just had entered after parking his SSKL 1931 Mercedes-Benz in the parking area off the driveway. "For the love of Christ, man, sit down! How deep did the stab go, do you know? Do you feel pain, weakness or giddiness? Any nausea?"