On an Odd Note

by Gerald Kersh

  And then came the darkness of unconsciousness, out of which the Major struggled to find himself in his bed, surrounded by curious eyes and astonished faces.

  That is all. There is only one thing more. The Major went into the wood again, and followed the route he remembered. There was the thicket; and there, in a hollow, lay the hut.

  On the floor of the hut, smashed to pieces where it had been violently flung down, lay the remains of a bit of mirror.

  THE GENTLEMAN ALL IN BLACK

  There is a crazy old fellow who lives—or used to live, in 1937—in a crazy old skylight room in Paris, and was known as Le Borgne. He squinted horribly, and was well known for his avarice. Although he was reputed to have a large sum of money put by, he shuffled about in the ragged remains of a respectable black suit and tried to earn a few coppers doing odd jobs in cafés. He was not above begging . . . a very unsightly, disreputable, ill-tempered old man. And this is the story he told me one evening when he was trying to get two francs out of me.

  “You needn’t look down on me,” he said. (He adopted a querulous, bullying tone even when asking a favor.) “I have been as well-dressed as you. I’m eighty years old, too. Ah yes, I have seen life, I have. Why, I used to be clerk to one of the greatest financiers in the world, no less a man than Mahler. That was before your time. That was fifty years ago. Mahler handled millions. I used to receive the highest of the high, the greatest of the great, in his office. There was no staff but me. Mahler worked alone, with me to write the letters. All his business was finished by three in the afternoon. He was a big man, and I was his right hand. I have met royalty in the office of Mahler. Why, once, yes, I even met the Devil.”

  And when I laughed at him, Le Borgne went on, with great vehemence:

  Mahler died rich. And yet it is I who can tell you that a week before his death things went wrong and Mahler was nearly twenty million francs in debt. In English money, a million pounds, let us say. I was in his confidence. He had lost everything and, gambling in a mining speculation, had lost twenty million francs which were not his to lose. He said to me—it was on the 19th, or the 20th of April, 1887—“Well, Charles, it looks as if we are finished. I have nothing left except my immortal soul; and I’d sell that if I could get the worth of it.” And then he went into his office.

  I was copying a letter to the Bank, about five minutes later, when a tall, thin gentleman dressed all in black came into my room and asked to see Monsieur Mahler. He was a strange, foreign-looking gentleman, in a frock-coat of the latest cut and a big black cravat which hid his shirt. All his clothes were brand new, and there was a fine black pearl in his tie. Even his gloves were black. Yet he did not look as if he was in mourning. There was a power about him. I could not tell him that Mahler could not be disturbed. I asked him what name, and he replied, with a sweet smile: “Say—a gentleman.” I had no time to announce him; I opened Mahler’s door and this stranger walked straight in and shut the door behind him.

  I used to listen to what went on. I put my ear to the door and listened hard, for this man in black intrigued me. And so I heard a very extraordinary conversation. The man in black spoke in a fine deep voice with an educated accent, and he said:

  “Mahler, you are finished.”

  “Nonsense,” said Mahler.

  “Mahler, there is no use in your trying to deceive me. I can tell you positively that you are in debt to the tune of just over twenty million francs—to be exact, 20,002,907 francs. You have gambled, and have lost. Do you wish me to give you further details of your embezzlements?”

  Calm as ice, Mahler said, “No. Obviously, you are in the know. Well, what do you want?”

  “To help you.”

  At this Mahler laughed, and said, “The only thing that can help me is a draft on, say, Rothschild’s, for at least twenty millions.”

  “I have more than that in cash,” said the gentleman in black and I heard something fall heavily on Mahler’s desk, and Mahler’s cry of surprise.

  “There are twenty-five millions there,” said the stranger.

  Mahler’s voice shook a little as he replied, “Well?”

  “Now let us talk. Monsieur Mahler, you are a man of the world, an educated man. Do you believe in the immortality of the soul?”

  “Why, no,” said Mahler.

  “Good. Well, I have a proposition to make to you.”

  “But who are you?” Mahler asked.

  “You’ll know that soon enough. I have a proposition. Let us say that I am a buyer of men’s time, men’s lives. In effect, I buy men’s souls. But let us not speak of souls. Let us talk in terms of time, which we all understand. I will give you twenty million francs for one year of your life—one year in which you must devote yourself utterly to me.”

  A pause: then Mahler said, “No.” (Ah, he was a cunning man of business, poor Mahler!) “No. That is too long. It’s too cheap at that price. I’ve made fifty million in less than a year before now.”

  I heard another little thud. The stranger said, “All right my friend. Fifty million francs.”

  “Not for a year,” said Mahler.

  The stranger laughed. “Then six months,” he said.

  And now I could tell, by the tone of his voice, that Mahler had taken control of the situation, for he could see that the strange man in black really wanted to buy his time. And Mahler had a hard, cold head, and was a genius at negotiation. Mahler said, “Not even one month.”

  Somehow, this affair brought sweat out on my forehead. It was too crazy. Mahler must have thought so too. The stranger said:

  “Come. Do not let us quarrel about this. I buy time—any quantity of time, upon any terms. Time, my friend, is God’s one gift to man. Now tell me, how much of your time, all the time that is yours, will you sell to me for fifty million?”

  And the cold, even voice of Mahler replied, “Monsieur. You buy a strange commodity. Time is money. But my time is worth more money than most. Consider. Once, when Salomon Gold Mines rose twenty points overnight, I made something like twenty million francs by saying one word, Soit, which took half a second. My time, at that rate, is worth forty million a second, and two thousand four hundred million francs a minute. Now think of it like that—”

  “Very well,” said the visitor, quite unmoved. “I’ll be even more generous. Fifty million a second. Will you sell me one second of your time?”

  “Done,” said Mahler.

  The gentleman in black said, “Put the money away. Have no fear; it is real. And now I have bought one second of your time.”

  Silence for a little while. Then they both walked to the window, which was a first-floor one, and I heard the stranger say:

  “I have bought one second of your time for fifty million francs. Ah well. Look down at all those hurrying people, my friend. That busy street. I am very old, and have seen much of men. Why, Monsieur Mahler . . . once, many years ago, I offered a man all the kingdoms of the earth. He would not take them. Yet in the end he got them. And I stood with him on a peak, and said to him what I say to you now—Cast thyself down!”

  Silence. Then I seemed to come out of a sleep. The door of Mahler’s office was open. Nobody was there. I looked out of the open window. There was a crowd. Mahler was lying in the street, sixteen feet below, with a broken neck. I have heard that a body falls exactly sixteen feet in precisely one second. That gentleman all in black was gone. I never saw him go. They said I had been asleep and dreamed him, and that Mahler had fallen by accident. Yet in Mahler’s desk lay fifty million francs in bonds, which I had never seen there before. I am sure he never had them before. I believe, simply, that the gentleman in black was the Devil, and that he bought Mahler’s soul. Think I am crazy if you like. On my mother’s grave I swear that what I have told you is true. . . . And now can you give me fifty centimes? I want to buy a meal. . . .”

  THE EYE

  The generosity of the criminal generally consists in the giving away of something that never was, or no longer is, his own p
roperty. A case in point is that of the robber and murderer, Rurik Duncan, whose brief career was bloody, fierce and pitiless, but whose last empty gesture was thick and sticky with sentiment which uplifted the heart of a nation. Duncan gave away his eyes to be delivered after his death. It was regarded as a vital act of charity—in effect, a ticket to Salvation—that this singularly heartless fellow gave permission for his eyes to be grafted onto some person or persons unknown.

  Similar cases have been printed in the newspapers. As it is with most philanthropists who give their all, so it was with this man Duncan. Having no further need for what he donated, he made a virtue of relinquishing it—stealing from his own grave, conning to the bitter end. I knew a billionaire whose ears were stopped during his lifetime against any plea for charity; but who, when his claws relaxed in death, gave what he had to orphans. I knew a Snow Maiden of an actress whose body is bequeathed to Science—whatever that may be. Rurik will rank with these, no doubt, on the Everlasting Plane. And why not? All the billionaire had that he was proud of was certain sums of money and holdings in perpetuity, which he let go because he had to. All the actress had was something of merely anatomical interest. Rurik had his eyes. He prized these eyes, which were of a strange, flecked, yellowish color. He could expand or contract them at will, and seemed to look in a different direction while he was watching your every movement.

  Before we proceed with this old story, I had better make some kind of resumé of Rurik’s career. He was born between the rocks and the desert, and was what, in my day, was called a “nuisance,” but what is now termed a “juvenile delinquent.” In my day physical force used to be applied to such, whereafter they generally lived to die in their beds; now they bring in psychologists, and quite right, too, because you can never tell where anything begins or ends. It is only in extreme cases that a Rurik, nowadays, is stopped in his career with a tingling jolt and—first and last restraint—the pressure of certain heavy leather straps.

  In brief: Rurik killed chickens, maimed sheep, corrupted and led a mob of fourteen-year-old muggers; graduated to the rackets in which he was employed to his pleasure and profit in nineteen states of the Union; got hot, gathered about him two coadjutors and became one of the most formidable operators since Dillinger. He had extraordinary luck, and a really remarkable sense of timing—without which no bank robber can hope to succeed. Also he had a highly developed administrative capacity, a strategic knack coupled with what one of the reporters called “tactical know-how.” He could time a getaway to that split second in which a traffic light winks, letting a town throw up its own road-block. Rurik went plundering from bank to bank. It has been argued that with such superb dissimulation and timing he might have been a great actor or, perhaps, a great boxer. He might have been a copper baron, or oil king, or a banker, if only he had been born in the right place and at the right time; or literate, an ink-slinger. But he wasn’t. He was born on an eroded farm, and went with a certain brilliance to his convulsive end.

  Oddly enough, Rurik was not given to vindictiveness or hate, in the generally accepted sense of these terms. Something was missing from him that makes society possible. Call it a soul, call it a heart, call it pity; but say that he wanted to be alone. And so he was, right to the end, with a high-backed chair all to himself, and a secret which he thought he would carry on his own, looked within himself, to a narrow place where nobody could touch him.

  This secret was the whereabouts of certain buried treasure; I mean the location of $2,600,000 which he had stolen and hidden nobody knew where.

  It was Rurik who stole the armored truck in Butte, Montana. At any moment now the pulp-writers will rehash the Rurik snatch as a “perfect crime.” The details are available in the files of all the newspapers in the world. It is sufficient to say, here, simply that Rurik and his two companions, later to be known as “The Unholy Three,” exquisitely timing and balancing the operation, got away with an immense payroll, together with nearly all the money that had been in the vault of a great bank, one day, and seemed to evaporate, truck and all. Timing, timing, timing, said the Sunday supplement criminologists; until one became sick and tired of the word. There was also some reference to Mr. G.K. Chesterton’s “The Invisible Man,” whose cloak of invisibility was the fact that he was too familiar, at a given hour, to appear conspicuously out of place.

  Both schools of thought were right: the timers and the psychologists. At one moment there was an armored truck loaded with money. Next moment there were three or four bewildered men, loosely holding pistols they did not know what to point at; three streets full of traffic had stopped for the lights, and a great fortune was on its way to nowhere. Only one shot was fired, and that by a bank guard named Larkin, a retired police officer who, when the three bandits appeared, one of them with a gun in his hand, let fly with a short-barreled .38. As it later transpired, Larkin hit Rurik in the hip and so precipitated his capture. When the money is recovered, it is believed, Larkin will have good legal grounds for claiming a reasonable portion of the reward. The robbers, by arrangement, carried unloaded automatics—it seems that Rurik was very particular about this. So, in about as long as it takes a man to say: “Was that a backfire?”—one of the greatest robberies of our time was perpetrated, and there was great federal perplexity. Anywhere in the world a man can disappear, as Willie Sutton did, simply by being patient and keeping still. In Montana, even an armored truck can disappear. But how does two and a half million-odd dollars disappear?

  They found the truck a certain distance out of town, empty. Where, then, was the paper money and the silver? Any moving-man will tell you that there is nothing heavier than paper, and any bank messenger will tell you that there is nothing more unwieldy than a bag of loose coin. He would be a very strong man indeed who could carry on his back even a quarter of a million dollars in small bills for the distance of fifteen city blocks. Throw in a bag or two of silver dollars to joggle the equilibrium, and put soft sand underfoot instead of paving stones, and no man can do it. A mule couldn’t. And here not two hundred and fifty thousand, but two and a half million dollars had been spirited away to some hiding place in the rocks!

  Reconstructing the affair, the federal authorities arrived at the conclusion that Rurik and his men stopped the truck somewhere on the outskirts of Butte and hid the money in some place tantalizingly close to town, known only to themselves. Each took $8,000 for current expenses. The truck was driven about fifteen miles further, to a point near where Rurik had hidden a getaway car. Rurik took this car, and then they separated, arranging to meet when it was expedient to do so. But this is what happened: Little Dominic, trying to buy a used car in Helena, was recognized and died fighting it out with the state troopers. MacGinnis lost his way northward among the rocks and died there, in his pig-headed way, rather than give himself up. Only Rurik was taken alive, having fainted through loss of blood in a filling-station.

  It is worthy of note that before he lost consciousness, his last words were: “Even maps you can’t trust,” and afterward raved of the illusion of space and the fallacy of distance, until they brought him to. The State pumped into Rurik the solid blood and the plasma of I forget how many honest men before he was brought to trial and convicted of the bank robbery. Here the FBI furnished the additional information that, under another name, Rurik was wanted in the state of New York for murder. So he was shipped back to New York, neatly patched up, and there after fair trial, found guilty and sentenced to death by electrocution. He took the sentence impassively, his only comment being: “A short life and a merry one—” though, since most of his short life had been spent hiding or running away, I find it difficult to concur with his opinion of merriment.

  Now while Rurik was playing pinochle in the death house, there came to him a certain Father Jellusik who said that Dr. Holliday, the eye surgeon, wanted Rurik’s eyes. The condemned man, laughing heartily, said: “Listen, Father, the D.A. offers me my life if I sing where the dough is stashed! And now somebody wants my
eyes. No disrespect, Father, but don’t make me laugh. D’you think I never heard how you can see things in a dead man’s eye?”

  Father Jellusik said, “My son, that’s an old wives’ tale. I have it on reliable authority that a dead man’s eye is no more revealing than an unloaded camera.”

  Rurik began, “Once I looked into . . . well, anyway, I never saw nothing. What do they want my eyes for?”

  “An eye,” said Father Jellusik, “is nothing but a certain arrangement of body tissue. Put it like this: you are you, Rurik. If one of your fingers were chopped off, would you still be Rurik?”

  “Who else?”

  “Without your arms and legs, who would you be?”

  “Rurik.”

  “Now say you had an expensive miniature camera, and were making your will. Wouldn’t you give it away?”

  “To the cops, no.”

  “But to an innocent child?”

  “I guess I might.”

  “And the eye, you know, is nothing but a camera.”

  In the end Rurik signed a document bequeathing his eyes to Dr. Holliday, for the benefit of this remarkable surgeon’s child patients, many of whom had been born blind. “You can’t take ’em with you,” Rurik is alleged to have said; thereby letting loose a tidal wave of emotion. One would have thought that Rurik was the first person ever to utter this proposition. The sob sisters took him to their bosoms, and put into his mouth all kinds of scrapbook philosophy, such as: “If more folks thought more about more folks, the world—” et cetera, et cetera. His last words, which were: “Hold it, I changed my mind,” were reported as: “I feel kind of at peace now.” The general public completely ignored the fact that there was a little matter of two and a half million dollars which Rurik had, to all practical intents and purposes, taken with him.