by S. T. Joshi
I looked long and hard. I made various calculations. A plan had begun to form.
* * * *
A little past midnight saw me back in that alley, but this time with a certain quantity of supplies, chief of which was a stout rope at least thirty feet long.
My earlier examination had revealed that there were two separate doors at the back of 548, and both had deadbolt locks, so it would be hopeless to pick either of them. There were several windows, but the lowest one was still about twenty feet up. It also interested me that this was the only building on the block without a fire escape, even though the structures on either side of it were fully equipped with them.
The fire escape of the building to the right of 548 was a bit nearer to that lowest window than the one on the left. So I made my way there, leaping up to grab the last segment of the fire escape ladder and pulling it down. I climbed up to the third floor of the building and stopped to survey the territory.
It would be tough, and dangerous, but I didn’t see what option I had.
I tied one end of the rope firmly to the metal railing of the fire escape and the other end around my own body. Then I climbed up on to the railing, paused there for a moment, and jumped.
My first attempt was a failure. I had gauged inaccurately, and only brushed the window-ledge of 548 with my hand before colliding painfully with the wall of the building and swinging back to the other building’s fire escape. I was now hanging just below the fire escape on that building’s second story. With difficulty I maneuvered myself up over the railing and went up one flight to try again.
The next go was better. I had seen that there was a metal projection—perhaps an attachment for a shutter—to the left of the window I was aiming for. I managed to grab it with my hand, even though its sharp edge caused a deep scratch on my left palm. For a moment I stood hanging there, legs flailing, right arm desperately scrabbling the brick wall feeling for some purchase. Finally my feet managed to reach the window-ledge and I hauled myself up. That shutter attachment was greasy with my own blood and difficult to hold on to, but I held fast while I gained my balance.
I waited a few moments for my heart to stop racing. I was breathing hard with exertion and adrenalin, and my whole body was quivering. It took minutes to get myself under control.
The window, as I had expected, was latched shut from the inside. I had come prepared for that. Reaching into a pouch I had attached to my waist, I took out a pencil to which I had attached a suction cup, and a glass cutter. My injured left hand was still gripping the metal attachment, so I had to place the pencil in my mouth while I worked the glass cutter.
After I had cut three edges of the pane nearest the window-latch, I placed the suction cup—still in my mouth—firmly on the glass, then cut the final edge. The pane popped out with unexpected vigor, and it snapped my head back so that I almost dropped it. But I held tight with my teeth. I put the glass cutter back in the pouch, carefully took the suction cup with the attached pane out of my mouth, and put that in the pouch also.
Then I reached through the window and unlatched it.
I still had only one hand with which to open the window. It had clearly not been opened for some time and proved recalcitrant. But with a grunt of effort I finally got it to budge. Levering it up from the bottom, I opened it as wide as it would go.
I rested my body half in and half out of the window, just as I had done in Dr. Grabhorn’s house back in Pasadena. The room within was pitch dark, and I had no idea what was in it. My blind fumbling revealed nothing except cardboard boxes piled high on either side of the window. There seemed nothing directly below the window.
I had no choice but to crawl, as gently as I could, down the wall of that room from the window. I was hoping I could land gently on the floor, but that floor proved to be lower than I had bargained for, and after a time I slipped out of the window and fell with a heavy thud on the concrete floor.
I was stunned for several moments. My left arm had been pinned under me as I fell, and I had also hit my forehead hard on the floor. Even though I realized the need for quiet, I groaned aloud in pain and shock. For a fleeting instant I wanted to do nothing but lie there and go to sleep.
But I had to get up, and finally did so. I appeared to be in a storeroom of some kind. Taking a flashlight out of my pouch, I cast it quickly around. The cardboard boxes seemed filled with medical supplies of various sorts—syringes, chemicals, test tubes, and the like. There was only a single door in the room, and I walked up to it.
I looked down at the floor and saw no light coming in through the crack of the door. So I took the knob in my uninjured hand and turned it—quietly and gently.
The room I now faced was completely empty save for a desk near its middle. It was shaped like a hexagon. Even in the darkness I could see that the entire room, including the desk, was painted white.
I was in the office of the Removal Company.
I didn’t waste time examining the room I was in. It was, if Arthur Vance’s description was sound, merely a kind of foyer. There would be another room—the one where he saw his wife Katharine, apparently dead, laid out on the hospital bed—and, beyond that, perhaps many other private rooms where Sanderson did his work.
The room I was in had several doors. One of them—to my right—must be the door at the top of the stairs leading up from the back door. Another, on the opposite end of the room and behind the desk, probably led to further offices.
I made for that door. I had no idea whether it might be locked or not, but somehow I doubted that it would be. It wasn’t.
I was in that paneled room where Vance must have seen his “dead” wife. There were two doors leading off of this room also, and I paused irresolute over which one to try. The one on the left-hand wall was locked, so I abandoned it for the time being while I approached the door on the back wall.
It was unlocked.
I found myself facing an unexpectedly long hallway, with several doors on either side. My sense of perspective was thrown off: somehow it didn’t seem as if this building was big enough to accommodate so many rooms. Each of them must have been quite small.
It was only now that I pulled out my gun.
Most of the doors had small windows roughly at eye level; but their interiors were uniformly dark, and I could see nothing in them. Every door I tried was locked.
Finally, at the end of the hall, I saw a door without any window in it. I cautiously tried the knob. It moved. The door was unlocked.
It was only moments after I had entered that room that I felt the heavy impact on my neck that sent me into oblivion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The throbbing in my head and neck was almost unendurable. I thought I might be violently ill if I tried to get up, so I did nothing but lie back on the mattress and rest my head on the soft pillow. There was an antiseptic smell in the air, but it was not unpleasant. I felt weak as a dishrag; my heart seemed to be racing, and tremors were running up and down my entire body, especially my arms and legs. Minutes after I opened my eyes in the dimness, I tried gingerly to get up.
I found that I was bound to a hospital bed with firm leather straps that pinned down my arms, legs, and body. It was all I could do to move my head forward a few inches.
I lay back again, exhausted and frustrated. I had been a perfect fool. Utterly careless. The seeming desertion of the place had caused me to let down my guard.
I had no idea what lay in store for me, but I was prepared for the worst. Vance had called Sanderson a “fiend” and a “devil,” and it now appeared that he was right.
The door of the small, narrow room I was in opened. A shadowy figure entered. It was Dr. Sanderson.
He did not turn on the light, for which I was relieved—it probably would have blinded me. But in the darkness—pierced only by a faint glow coming from somewhere far away down the corridor—Sanderson looked blurred, hazy, as if the outlines of his body were not well defined.
“Ah,” he said,
“Mr. Scintilla, I see you have awoken. I trust you’ll pardon the injury I inflicted upon you. I am not accustomed to invaders.”
“Don’t mention it.” I really didn’t feel like bandying words with the fellow, but apparently I had no choice.
He pulled up a wooden chair and sat down in it. In that position his head was actually a bit lower than my supine body, and he had to look up at me. The dim glow from the corridor lit up his face eerily.
“You have been most industrious, Mr. Scintilla. It does appear as if you have probed nearly all my secrets.”
“Have I?” I said weakly. “There are plenty of things I still don’t know.”
“You’d like some explanations?” Sanderson said, smirking slightly.
I gave as good an imitation of a shrug as I could manage. “The biggest question, doctor, is why. What’s your game? What are you really trying to do?”
Sanderson got up abruptly and began walking about the room. “My dear sir, that could be taken in a number of ways. Exactly what do you mean? You wish to discuss my philosophy, or my methods?”
“Maybe a bit of both.”
He almost grinned. “Yes, I now recall...you are a student of philosophy, are you not? Johns Hopkins, I believe?”
I said nothing. He had clearly done his homework.
“Perhaps, Mr. Scintilla, it might be best if you told me what it is that I am trying to do. I will then supplement or amend your account as needed.”
I felt strangely as if I were back in college, with a professor tutoring me in his office.
“All right,” I said. “Some of it I get, some of it I don’t.... You know, it might be helpful if you untied me. This is mighty uncomfortable.”
Sanderson looked at me with a sort of mild benevolence. “You are so right, Mr. Scintilla. Please forgive me.”
And he undid all the leather straps around me. In doing so he made it pretty clear that he had a revolver in a holster around his chest. But he knew I wasn’t planning anything: I was so weak that I could do little but stretch my body around a bit.
Then I noticed that a bandage had been placed on my left hand.
Sanderson saw my glance. “You were bleeding rather badly there, I’m sorry to say.”
Without looking at him I said: “Thanks.”
There was silence for several moments. Then:
“All right, Dr. Sanderson, if that’s your name”—he merely smiled at that—“here’s what I figure is going on. You have a lot of people—psycho-analysts, servants, maybe even regular doctors—who funnel potentially suicidal people to you. You claim to help them put an end to their lives easily and painlessly, at the same time exacting immense fees from them for the service. But instead of killing them, you first give them some kind of drug that gives them the appearance of death; then, when you revive them, you perform some kind of hypnotism so that they take on someone else’s personality. Right so far?”
He said: “I will admit that there is a great deal more to it than that, but in essence that is correct.”
“All right. But what I don’t get is: how do you plant the ‘new’ personalities? When you turned Katharine Vance into Elena Cavalieri, how did you get her into the Greenway household, and how did you get Harry Greenway to marry her?”
Sanderson actually laughed. “My good man, that is the easiest part of the procedure. Do you know anything about Mr. Harry Greenway—or rather, his father?” I shook my head. “He was a very rich man—and he became rich in ways that are...shall we say, somewhat unsavory? It was child’s play to collect certain—information—on him so that he was persuaded to take in his long-lost second cousin and eventually marry her. Perhaps he even loved her: she is, as you know, very beautiful.”
“So,” I said, “in addition to all your other activities, you’re a blackmailer.”
Sanderson gave me a mildly exasperated look, as if I were a doltish schoolboy. “Mr. Scintilla, you weary me. I do not think you quite grasp what it is that I am trying to do. You yourself—I know from my research—have no love lost for the wealthy among us; neither do I. There is scarcely a wealthy man in America, or the world, who does not have something he wishes to hide; and if I can make use of that something for the benefit of others, then I shall do so.”
He suddenly brought his face close to mine.
“Do you take me for an evil man? Do you think that what I do is criminal, morally reprehensible, nefarious? Let me tell you how I look at things, and perhaps you will think differently.”
He began pacing again.
“There are, Mr. Scintilla, a great many people in this world who are unhappy. Perhaps they have an incurable illness; perhaps they are suffering from unassuaged grief; or perhaps they are simply morose, depressed, cheerless—facing long years of misery, tedium, and uselessness.
“You are a philosopher, Mr. Scintilla. Do you not remember your Schopenhauer? ‘The conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.... Human life must be some kind of mistake.’ Think deeply about that utterance, Mr. Scintilla: Human life must be some kind of mistake. Now I do not go quite that far. I myself derive considerable pleasure out of existence—but there are those who do not. And you know as well as I that I have never—never—‘assisted’ someone who did not genuinely wish to die.
“Mr. Scintilla, people are weak. They are irresolute, indecisive, incapable of taking control of their own lives. To engineer one’s death is the best, the noblest thing a human being can do. It is the ultimate expression of self-sufficiency. Suicide is never cowardly, it is always brave. The Romans knew that; the Japanese samurai knew that. All I do is to assist such people—or, rather, give them that illusion.”
“But you don’t kill them, do you? Have you ever ‘assisted’ anyone in committing suicide?”
“Not a one,” he said proudly. “What I had told Mr. Vance on this subject was quite true: I would be foolish to do such a thing, for it would have brought me to the gallows long ago. Do you think I would risk my own life in that way even for immense sums of money? I would be mad to do so.”
“Then why do you extort such a fee? You must have made millions by now.”
“Extort? Come now. In the first place, the large sums I request my wealthier clients to pay are well within their resources, and moreover they are required to foster the deception that their loved ones really are being...removed. So too that rigmarole about signing the paper implicating the surviving party—in your case, Mr. Arthur Vance—as an ‘accessory’ in my ‘crime.’
“In the second place, my man, that fee is quite variable. Do you truly imagine that I only seek wealthy clients? That would be barbaric. I am not a money-grubber. I turn no one away, and in some cases my fee is very modest. Why”—with a twisted smile—“I suspect even you could afford it. I am always happy to make special allowances.”
This was rapidly getting tiresome. Sanderson was beginning to sound like some kind of mad scientist. And yet, there was something not quite right here: he seemed to be putting on an act, with his precise, stilted manner of speaking. It wasn’t him; it sounded phony. He was trying to hide something.
“But why give your ‘victims’ the personalities of someone else?” I said. “It seems awfully cumbersome.”
“It is very cumbersome, Mr. Scintilla. But creating a person out of whole cloth would be far more so. In this Vance matter, the death of the real Elena Cavalieri and her parents seemed to present a golden opportunity. I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with that regrettable accident?”
I said nothing. The thought had indeed crossed my mind.
“It was not likely,” Sanderson continued, “that anyone knew anything about the Cavalieris, and they really were cousins of the Greenways, as you have discovered, so no one would think anything of it when Harry Greenway took poor Elena under his wing. Were it not for that boating accident, Mrs. Vance may have gone somewhere else altogether: I had a number of
other possibilities in my files....
“Once again, you do not quite grasp the entire picture—nor, indeed, the difficulties involved. You refer to my ‘hypnotism.’ That is far too crude a term for what I actually do. It takes months, Mr. Scintilla, months to indoctrinate my ‘victim,’ as you term it, into his or her new personality. That labor alone justifies my high fees. The old personality must be wiped out entirely—or, at any rate, covered over completely with the new one. Memories, reaching back to childhood, modes of behavior, down to the smallest instinctive gestures—all these things take an immense amount of time and effort.”
“But you slipped up there, Sanderson. You didn’t quite do the job. Katharine Vance thought she had Elena Cavalieri’s memories of growing up in Italy, but she didn’t recognize the very house she had lived in.”
Sanderson exhaled heavily. “Sir, there are limits even to my thoroughness. I managed to make her a false passport and visa, and to have that false immigration record planted at Ellis Island—that was child’s play, given the low salaries those poor officials receive—but I had no expectation that someone like you would trouble to go all the way to Italy to check Miss Cavalieri’s background. Your industry is to be praised, Mr. Scintilla, however awkward it may be to me.”
Now I felt like a schoolboy who, much to the teacher’s surprise, had come up with a right answer.
“The fact is,” he continued, “that it was not entirely your own doggedness and ingenuity that caught me in my deception, but an unfortunate series of accidents. If Mr. Vance had not seen that clipping from the newspaper—yes, I know all about that—he would never have come to you, and we would not be here right now. In truth, most of ‘clients’—or, rather, their survivors—do not trouble to pursue such matters. They have long since resigned themselves to the departure of their loved ones, and when those loved ones are in fact out of the way, that is usually the end of it. Most people would wish to forget such things as quickly as possible.”