King Coffin: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  Jones! If only it was Jones!

  And why not?

  He knocked his pipe softly against the yellow-plaster wall, dislodged the light crust of ash, began to laugh. That it should turn out to be a Jones would be almost too good to be true. The anonymous one, the abstract one, the mere Specimen Man—it would be perfect! But even if it turned out to be Farrow——

  Walking forward to the front window, he looked down into School Street, ticked the black pipestem against his teeth, reflected with narrowed and unseeing eyes. The thing was beginning; he was in the presence of it; his shadow was already falling upon the tree, like an immense frost of peril; and even as he stood here, in the shabby hallway, unknown to the tweed hat which now hung on its peg, his powerful influence was beginning to expand and penetrate. He had entered the stranger’s little world, he was here inside it, learning its shape and size, taking possession of it. This worn wooden floor, the scarred plaster of the walls, the ground glass of the old-fashioned doors, the gas bracket in the corner—this was the stranger’s domain, known to his feet and hands and eyes, returned to day after day, dreamed about, hated, loved. The whole little life was beginning to lie open, like a familiar book.

  Opening the window, he leaned out; and at once something caught his eye. The telegraph office. His long hands tightened on the edge of the sill,—the idea was sudden, and like a pair of claws. It was as simple as lightning. And it would be as effective.

  Two minutes later, in the telegraph office, he wrote Gerta’s telephone number on a yellow telegraph form, added “please call after 11,” and sealed it in an envelope. On the envelope he printed with the pencil the name “K. N. Jones.”

  —I want a messenger, please, right away.

  —Yes, sir, for how long——

  —I want him to come with me and deliver this note at the foot of School Street, while I wait outside for an answer. It will take him five minutes.

  —Yes, sir, that will be——

  —Give me the change from this.

  Outside the barbershop, he handed the yellow envelope to the boy and explained.

  —Just take this in and deliver it to Mr. Jones—or if Mr. Jones isn’t there, to Mr. Farrow. The third floor. I want you to notice what the man you give it to looks like. That’s all. Then come down and tell me, and I’ll give you a dollar. Have you got it?

  —Yes, sir.

  —All right, beat it. And make it quick.

  Within a minute, the boy was back, grinning.

  —I gave it to Mr. Jones, all right! And was he surprised! He asked me where it come from, but of course I didn’t say a word.

  —What did he look like?

  —Oh, one of these little guys, with a kind of a Charlie Chaplin mustache, and sort of bald.

  —Was there anybody else there?

  —No, sir.

  —All right—here’s your dollar. And keep it under your hat.

  —Sure thing. Thanks. Say, are you a detective?

  —Yes. And by the way, what’s your name?

  —Costello, sir. Peter Costello.

  —I might need you again sometime. Now beat it, and forget it—see?

  —Sure.

  Clouds and a wind, the wild heavens opened and closed with wild light, the morning had deepened immeasurably, was deepening with each breath he drew: what a surprise was in store for Gerta, what a surprise was in store for Jones, what a surprise was in store for God! With his hand clenched tight in his pocket he held an imaginary revolver, he was already climbing the hill among the cedars to his particular place, the little hollow among birches and junipers, he was already taking aim at the rock, and now, rapidly and repeatedly, he pulled the fatally compliant trigger. Mr. K. N. Jones, of the Acme Advertising Agency, was as good as dead.

  When he reached the Parker House Hotel, he suddenly decided to go in—he wanted not only to wash his hands, very carefully and slowly, but also to admire in the mirror above the washbasin the fine forehead and the extraordinary eyes of the man who had now so clearly and calmly seen to the end of a human life: King Coffin.

  VII The Seven Words of the Stranger

  If for a moment the thing, in coming closer, seemed almost in the nature of an encroachment, as if his own shadow were somehow falling on himself, or his own image walking toward him out of a mirror, the sensation passed immediately, with a mere knitting of the brows, and what ensued was a natural and profound laughter, the golden laughter of the gaia scienza, the gay wisdom. The heavens and the houses laughed together, the whole sound of the hostile city was gay, not to say ribald, and it was as if he himself were mounting rapidly up a spiral of air or light. The impulses were many and confused—to call up Gerta, for example, to call up Sandbach, call up Toppan, even Mrs. Taber; to call them all up and tell them what had happened. Ammen speaking! Yes? And I wanted to say that I’ve found a man, a stranger, and I have him on the end of an invisible cord, a cord three miles long, and with this cord I shall slowly but surely kill him. I shall dangle him there like a puppet, like Punch or Judy, until I want him. I shall then summon him to the place of execution, wherever I choose, and it shall be done.… But against this was also the contrary impulse, and the more natural—to make this the beginning of a new and essentially secret life: to go underground, into darkness, and to remain there. No one should know what he was doing, where he was, what planning, what evolving: at most, now and then, he would give them the fleetingest of little signals, the showing of a single and ambiguous light, glimpsed for only a moment and gone again, or the utterance of a deceptive word or two in the most disguised and bland of voices. They would know nothing, until he had returned at last from the underworld, wearing a new terribleness of splendor. And even then though they would recognize the new power, the new terror, they would guess in vain at the reason, find him as mysterious in the light as in the dark.

  But only for the time being.

  This fact must not be lost sight of.

  He lengthened and quickened his pace, he had thought little about his direction, found himself now proceeding from the foot of Mount Vernon Street to the Esplanade against gusts of wind, the Charles River Basin lay before him half clouded, half flashing under the changing sky, the nearer waves leaden, the farther bright. The raw new works for the new lagoons, islands, bridges, the stretches of bare earth where as yet no grass showed, the heavy masses of unplaced stone lying awry, the ungainly bastions projecting against the river, windswept and sinister,—all this accorded admirably with his own changing scene, his sense of disruption and tumult. The ruthlessness and purposiveness of architecture, of the architect—yes, there are times when one must be a Bucyrus-Erie steam shovel.

  Only for the time being: the shadow lay heaviest in that phrase, in the notion of time. Once the weapon had been aimed, one could not delay indefinitely the pulling of the trigger; there must necessarily be a limit to the time during which one merely observed, from a distance, and for whatever satisfaction, one’s quarry: the one-who-wants-to-be-killed must be killed! But need it be at once?

  It was a nice question.

  Actually, of course, there was no hurry. Mr. Jones could not escape—for how could he take flight from a danger of which he wasn’t even aware? He would be there, he would wait, as long as it was necessary for him to wait. But this wasn’t really the problem. The real problem was once more in the matter of purity, and about this it was imperative to think very clearly, without any vagueness or any self-deception. One must be certain that one was not delaying for the wrong reasons: for example, out of fear, or a distrust of one’s mere competence. But that was dismissed as soon as considered. The thing would be, if not entirely simple, at all events quite practicable: it would need, when the right time came, when the circumstances had been sufficiently studied or arranged only the cool exercise of a little logic. Some small and quite uncomplicated structure of deception would serve, all the more obviously in view of the fact that the victim was completely unsuspecting. An invitation to something, so
mewhere—Belmont, Concord, Nantasket——

  No, there was no cause for worry, there was no fringe of self-deception, he was not afraid; the thing was as good as done. He could safely leave the actual form of the murder to be determined by future events. The revolver, with which he was an expert marksman, brought all the way from Naples, canoe on the Concord River—these details need not yet be considered. Or a casual lurch in the subway? What was far more important now was the other question, which he had not quite clearly foreseen though he had vaguely felt it—the question as to how legitimate would be the mere pleasure in observation, in the daily watching and study of Mr. K. N. Jones. In the last half hour, the intense reality of this pleasure had become only too manifest. It must have been, from the very beginning, somewhere vaguely in his mind—it was certainly a part of the pleasure of the pure detective-impulse, as discussed by himself and Toppan. But admitting this, how safely and for how long could it be protracted? The line must be drawn somewhere—the stranger must in essence remain a stranger—and if it was perhaps legitimate to learn as much about the little man as possible, by careful study, one must be scrupulous in learning only what could be learned from outside. Yes, that was it; that would keep it pure: everything would be all right as long as the stranger did not know him. The stranger must not become an acquaintance? Even this was not wholly clear, however—for if knowing about his victim was a perfectly legitimate part of his pleasure, then surely it was difficult to set any limit?…

  Advertising; he was an advertising agent; a publicity expert. Presumably not a very good or successful one. What did such fellows do? And how could that be found out?

  Two girls, one of them with an Alsatian on a leash, walked for a moment parallel with him.

  —And from where I was sitting in the front row of the balcony I could look right down on his little pink bald head——

  —Was his wife there too?

  —Yes, I suppose it was——

  —With red hair? and she has very skinny arms, you can see them when she wears——

  He turned to the left, entered the rutted and shabby alley behind Beacon Street, paused to let a car pass, looked in and saw an old lady with a black hat and veil—the fierce bird’s-eyes peered at him and were gone. For some reason he stood still, gazed after the retreating car, watched it swing slowly, bumping over the uneven surface, up the left turn which took it to Beacon Street. A final glimpse of that white and hostile Boston profile and it had vanished. Something in it, as in this wind, the rapid shift of cold spring sunlight with gray shadow, brought him an eclipse: his hatred rose suddenly and sharply, the vision returned to him at last night at Gerta’s, it grew like a tree, thrust darkly and venomously above him, spread violent and lethal boughs to right and left over the hated void. As he stood still in the dusty alley, with tightening arms and hands held hard against his sides, it was himself who thus grew and darkened and obscurely multiplied. He had taken possession of the world. Conscious of his powerful arrogance, his half-closed eyes, his out-going intelligence and limitless vision, he looked to right and left along the alley as far as he could, saw the few people in the distance, knew them, dismissed them. They had not noticed him, and even if they had, they were as unaware of his true reality, his malevolence, as the oak tree is of thunder. If they saw him at all, they saw him simply as a man standing still in a dusty alley, a man with dusty shoes, tall and thin, dressed in a dark suit, his dark hair blown in the wind. Perhaps they thought of him as odd and solitary, or even as absurd and self-conscious: as if to be standing there close to the high brick wall, motionless in the swirling dust, was a kind of awkward pose, something either meaningless or ridiculous. Or shabby and mean.…

  Mean!

  But how could it be that?

  He looked quickly upward toward the sound of an opening window, saw a maid shake a dusting cloth with a downward gesture of the white arm, felt for a moment something inimical in the mere notion of height. To be enclosed thus anonymously between high walls, and as if purposeless, at a standstill—this was to be enacting the “unrecognized” Satan, the Satan in disguise. It was that moment when Satan, humbly clad, has not yet declared himself; skulks in the background; pulls the hood low over his marked bright forehead; has not yet pointed toward the victim his mesmeric forefinger. Certainly there might be a kind of meanness in this,—as there was in any mere solitude. To be alone, in an absolute sense, was also to be mean, as the acorn or the toad is mean. But also to be alone was to be magnificent.…

  He gave his laugh again, turning, he had come back again to his starting point, the laughter of the gay wisdom, it was all as clear and beautiful and ominous as a black beetle in a golden blaze of light. The scarab! He was the scarab. And with precisely that kind of hard and precious immortality. And its touch, when K. N. Jones felt it, would be cold.

  But the telephone call was imminent, he must get to Gerta’s room, be waiting there, listen—for the first time—to the stranger’s voice. Gerta would not be at home of course, she was at the Museum, working in the print-room—perhaps he would leave a note for her. Crossing Charles Street, he ascended Chestnut, stamped the dust from his shoes, heard the sentences of the dialogue forming, listened intently to the new voice which crept all the way over the hill from an office in School Street. Advertising. The Acme Advertising Agency. The Farrow might be mythical. A one-horse show. Bought out, perhaps. And who went to such a firm for advertising?

  When Sally let him in, unsurprised by his request to use the telephone and to leave a note, it was ten minutes to eleven. The room was empty, silent, smelt faintly of turpentine. The blue smock hung over the back of an unpainted chair, the green bowl of apples stood on the sill, the notice of an art show was propped against one of the candles. On the corner table, tilted to the wall, was a new painting—a new Gerta—which obviously she must have concealed the night before. Like all of Gerta’s recent work, it was queer, it surprised him—as if abruptly she had begun speaking in a foreign language. It might be the interior of a lunar volcano,—the inside, the wall,—but it was vascular with silver, encrusted as with heavy silver veins which seemed to have a cold and heavy life, and above this, in a light as dead and clear as terror, were two winged things, not birds, not moths, which appeared to be at dalliance. Above these, in turn, was a little hard pale wafer of a sun.

  What did Gerta mean by it?

  He took it to the window, held it to the light, saw how heavily crusted was the paint, all that veined interior as solid as a honeycomb, but also with a queer phosphorescent unreality. A strange world, as strange as his own, she was a match for him, it was what he had always liked in her: she had secret depths and heights, there must somewhere be a Kay in her family. She had said—aren’t we both mad?

  No.

  He replaced the picture, then stood still in the middle of the floor. At this minute, perhaps Jones had his watch in his hand, was putting out his arm toward the telephone, pulling it toward him, waiting. Or perhaps he was walking to and fro in the room, in the little dingy office, unable to sit down, wondering what the mysterious note could mean: and whether it meant a job or not, and why it had come by messenger. Perhaps the bottle of whisky stood on the desk, with a tumbler beside it. And an ash tray littered with matches and cigarette ends. Or had he forgotten the message already? was busy, wouldn’t call at all? It seemed unlikely. The very fact that it had come by Western Union messenger would make it appear all the more urgent.…

  Urgent! He little knew.

  A faint premonitory buzzing, and then the telephone, as if clearing away an obstruction, began its sharp and rhythmic ringing. For a moment he stood and listened to it, gazed down at it, smiled as he put his hand on it and lifted it, the receiver still unremoved. Beware lest, if thou gazest into the abyss, the abyss gaze also into thee!

  —Hello?

  —Hello? This is K. N. Jones speaking, of the Acme Advertising Agency. I received a note asking me to call this number——

  —I beg your pa
rdon?

  —I say I received a note this morning asking me to call——

  —Oh, I see; this is Mr. Jones.

  —Yes. Who is this speaking, please?

  —The Acme Advertising Agency, is that right?

  —Yes! Yes?

  The voice was a little anxious, a little eager, a little mystified: but low-pitched and quite pleasant. After a pause, getting no reply, it went on:

  —What can I do for you?…

  —Well, as a matter of fact, I’m not quite sure as yet. I merely wanted to make an inquiry.

  —I see. Well, I’ll be glad to give you any information I can——

  —You undertake all sorts of advertising work, I assume?

  —Oh, yes. Anything and everything. Perhaps you could give me an idea of what it is you want?

  Carrying the telephone with him, he took three steps to the window, placed the felted base of the transmitter on the sill beside the bowl of apples, looked down over the roofs toward the Esplanade, the bright surface of the Charles River Basin, the far-off Harvard Bridge. The window was a few inches open, and he closed it by bearing softly down upon the sash with his elbow.