The Man with the Magic Eardrums Read online

  He sat down with marked abruptness.

  “Well?” I queried.

  He scratched his chin. I could even hear the nail rasping against the as-yet-invisible bristle-tips.

  “As I understand it,” he said, “if I can—by any chance—wiggle the combo of your burglar-proof safe to a point where she unlocks—and give you the low-down on what I do—rather, how I do it—I’m—I’m to catch a walk-out powder free?”

  “Hell—yes,” I said. “Putting you in the jug doesn’t put anything in my pocket.”

  He sat thoughtful.

  “All right, Mr. King. I’ll try to play with you on that basis. An’ maybe I’ll fall on my schnozzolo, too, at that! Trying to get a box—as good as that—open. For my chances to do it are just about 50-50—no less—no more. But how I expect to do it, eh? Well, I’m sunk, as a burglar, around the Twin Cities all right, once you tell this story to your Nicollet Racing Club. But here’s how—for I don’t like iron bars and stone walls.”

  And he proceeded to tell me, in full detail, how he expected to open a Nixon-Duvall 5-dial burglar proof safe—type 36-B! And the telling of which would determine—once and for all—whether that black wretch in Pentonville Prison could be prevented from divulging her facts to the world.

  CHAPTER IV

  The Magic Eardrums

  “You was asking me,” the man across from me began, “a short while back, about these here things in my ears—what leave me deaf—and how!—when I take ’em out. Which I never do, by the way, till I turn the lights out at night—my dome on my pillow. And my being deaf has got everything to do with what I’m about to tell you now.” He paused. “And I’m also telling you, Mr. King, that I wouldn’t admit being deaf to my own brother—if I had one—that’s how goddamn sensitive I am—on the fool subject. And I—all right—don’t frown me down!—I’ll get going.” He paused again. “Well, there ain’t really much to the story. I was employed in a secondhand safe store—over on Portland Avenue, St. Paul—when I first started to go deaf. And I went fast. Got so, that within two months, I couldn’t hear at all.

  “So I go, see, to a specialist down in th’ New York Building. That don’t do nothing but ear stuff. A double saw and a fin he charges me—25 bucks, in plain English. And he examines me with tuning forks—and vibrating prongs a-laying on the bone, back of my ears—and ever’thing—to see what kind of deafness I got—and fin’ly he prescribes these here Cromely patented artificial eardrums. Cromely Micro-acoustic Sound-Focusing Auricles they’re actually called. I learnt their name well so’s I could call for ’em in any city—long’s I lived—without prying loose any more fat mazuma to specialists. They work—so far’s I understand it—by focusing sound down close ag’in th’ eardrum—like a lens, you know, what gathers a lot of rays o’ light together and lays ’em in one spot. Their inside curves—the way th’ doctor explains it—are composed of a lot of signs and co-signs and tangos and epi-bicycles that hurl th’ sound waves coming into the ear into each other’s laps, like. And—all right—don’t frown me down—I’ll get going. But unless you understand this, you ain’t going to get nothing of what I’m setting forth for you. All right. Well, I orders me two pairs—twenty-five bucks a pair—each pair consisting o’ 10 cents worth o’ hard rubber, $20 worth o’ royalties, and $4.90 worth of these here now sign and co-sign curves! I shoot my wad, see, to have that extra pair—in case the goddamn comp’ny goes out of business like the makers of the old Austin car, if you remember that today. And leaves me, thereby, up th’ famous creek—you know?—without a paddle.” He paused. “Well, soon’s I put ’em in—the pair of ear gadgets, I mean, what I’m gonna use regular—I can hear again. God—Christ—it feels good! You don’t know what it’s like to live in a world o’ silence.” He paused again. “Well, one day, maybe a couple o’ months later, I’m going down to work, see? And can’t find the pair o’ gadgets I’d been using in my ears. They’d fell behind th’ bed when I pulled ’em out in the dark, and I ain’t time to look for ’em, being late already. So I goes to my buroo drawer—and fishes out th’ other pair. What I ain’t ever used yet, see? And put ’em in. And Jesus—even then I know there’s some­thing wrong. I hear creakings in the furniture—high-pitched singings in the steam-radiator pipe that sounds like—like angel harps—sounds such as I’ve never heard before. I know right away that the gadgets that are in my ears are a squew-gee pair—tuned up wrong—see?—built wrong.

  “So I decides to be late to work—tips off the black gal that makes up the bed not to throw them other drums out if she takes a notion to sweep under it, which there ain’t much danger of since she never does any sweeping anyhow. And slips her a dime—and a smile to boot—the dime to add to the 23,000 bucks she owns—an inhairtance—and the smile because the wench is nuts about me. And—”

  “Nuts about you?” I broke in. “And owning 23,000 ‘bucks’? Why,” I asked, half-jokingly—and yet at the same time half-seriously—“didn’t you marry her? With 23,000 bucks?”

  “Marry—a nigger?” he retorted, plainly aghast, And drew himself up, in his chair, to a full higher inch in stature. “Say, a guy who would marry a nigger is so low that—Listen, a guy who wouldn’t cut his own throat before marrying a nigger ought—ought to have it cut for him. Say, I—I may be low in this here social scale—but so help me, I’ve never sunk so low as to marry a nigger. Nor never will!”

  And the supreme withering contempt in his voice made me inwardly wince. Even he—an ex-safe-roustabout, as he termed himself—was above that!

  “Go on with the story,” I said sharply, “So you tipped the girl to rescue the regular eardrums? And then—what?”

  “Yes, and I fixes to go down to the New York Building and stop by the specialist. And Jesus—on the way—on a streetcar—I’m late, as I say, so there ain’t many people on it—do I blush? Whooie! There’s a couple o’ lovers sitting a full six seats back of me—whispering. And I hear every goddamn word they say. A fact! Well, I’d heard plenty things about the new generalization, but—all right—I’ll get going.” He paused. “Well, by Christ, I’m nearly nuts when I get down to the New York Building. For the noises are—”

  “You mean,” I asked curiously, “that all sounds were louder?”

  “No. Strange to say, they wasn’t any louder—but sounds that was lighter come square into the range. Invisible sounds—if you get me. That’s as near’s I can explain it. I heard things that no ears could ever hear.

  “Well, I find the specialist in—twiddling his thumbs and waiting for more suckers to do a cutor’s worth o’ work on, and bill for twenty-five bucks. And he explains what’s wrong with them gadgets. Without even looking at ’em. He says in th’ making of them drums—or auricles, as he terms ’em—they’re purposely expected to be a little bit off-focus—like a lens that can’t bring things to a clear-cut spot o’ light. And shouldn’t. And he says that the pair in my ears is accidentally in a complete acoustic sound focus—in fact, from the way I describes things to him—and even he’s puzzled a bit!—they’re in a sound focus so complete that nothing like it would happen in a million such pairs—or a million years, maybe. Because, says he, in the turning of the rubber in the lathe, one o’ them math’matical curves has been accident’ly left out of th’ combination of curves—th’ partic’lar cam, see, f’r that partic’lar curve prob’ly got left off the’ cam shaft by the workman on that partic’lar job—and the absence of that curve jimmied the effect of all the other curves up—and the result is, at least from the way I tell it to him, that all sound flowing into each of my ears is falling right on the middle of its tin-pann-um—the eardrum, see?—and all concentrated on a spot no bigger than a pin-point. He says that if they annoy me too much I’m to take ’em back to th’ makers and say I’m his patient—and they’ll give me a good pair. Which’ll be properly blurred—‘blurred’ is the word he used.

  “Well, I’m downtown now—the gadgets
in my ears—and so I go to work. It’s a scrooey feeling, too, I’m telling you—at least at first—hearing all kinds of things that one don’t ord’narily hear. But I endure it, see? And it happens that near mid-morning a cheap safe goes on the bum. One of these tomato cans—well, you said you had one such in your office in the Plymouth Building, here in Minny—so you’ll get me, I guess. This here one is one that a guy that knows anything at all about safes can open—if he just puts his ears to the combo and listens to th’ clickety-click o’ the tumblers. So I puts my ear to it—not thinking—and Jesus!—I don’t only hear the clickety-clicks—but I hear new sounds and tumblings about that I ain’t never heard before. I hear a whole family argument between the whole tumbler family—even the things they says about each other under their breaths! And it gets me to thinking. So when comes time to put on the feedbag—at noon—I stay in. See? And I look me up one of these here Nixon-Duvall safes. A secondhand one. That I happened to know the combo on. I put my ear as goddamn close to the combo as I can get it. And play around with it. Sure—I know it don’t work by no tumblers—but you never can tell nothing in life unless you try, can you? And boy, oh boy, I’m telling you—th’ inside faces o’ all them dials, and their contac’ shafts on the side, certa’nly are finished by being handrubbed with emory molycules—for even with my eardrums, that now seem to be able to hear a lady fly sighing after her gent fly has kissed her—to hear anything at all, I have to listen like as if I was trying to hear a dago eating spaghetti in Naples—with me in Shanghai. But faint—damn faint-like!—I catch me a little weak sort of a murmur—Christ no, not even that!—a—a sort—a sort of choked-off whisper, as near as I can describe it, like th’ good-by of a dying centurian—that’s a guy, Mr. King, who’s a hundred years old—whenever a certain two numbers on any two adjoining dials pass each other. And in each case them two numbers, I find, are two of th’ numbers that got to be together—the whole five of ’em—under the arrow point engraved on the safe door—for opening it. A half hour it takes me to find out even that much. And thinks I, I’ve got it. I—”

  “Hold—a second,” I said. “How could there be a sound of any sort—even to your magic ears—if—”

  “If there wasn’t no mech’nism operating?” he put in for me. “Yeah, how? Well, long after this was over, I doped that out. Must be, I tells myself, that a couple o’ points o’ some alloy inside used for electro-contact in th’ contact box back o’ the safe door come alongside each other, and was magnetic, and they gen’rated a feeble magnetic floox or something in the metal o’ th’ safe door—and what I heard was th’ molycules in th’ safe door complaining. Like—you know—people in a crowd growl at each other: ‘Quit shoving’?”

  “Your great familiarity with the psychology of the Molecule Family,” I put in, “leads me to think that you should have been a physicist?”

  “I should have been a physic—” he put in puzzledly. “Going around—giving kids castor oil—you mean?” The helpless look on his round face was comical. “Oh, it’s easy,” he added grum­pily, “to kid another guy, Mr. King, when you’ve an oscar in your coat pocket. But I can take a little o’ that, I guess. I can—”

  “Get going with the tale,” I ordered him.

  “Oke! Well,” he continued, after a second’s pause, “I try another secondhand Nixon-Duvall that has just come in. Only the boss has the combo on that one. And Jesus—I have to do some listening, I’m telling you. For even the movable parts in them safes work ag’in each other like eels’ tongues lapping up olive oil. And when it comes to hearing molycules—all right—all right. It’s on’y a theory o’ mine anyway, that molycule business. But, anyway, I damn near lose th’ sound I’m listening for, half the time, maybe because somebody a mile away takes their magnetic jackknife outa their pocket and sharpens a pencil—or some­thing—and knocks, whatever ’tis that happens, all scrooey! Rather, le’ me say, I damn near don’t ever get the sound I’m looking for. But careful like, I turn dials and listen—turn dials and listen—and, by God!—I get her open! A Nixon-Duvall safe! Me, Peter Givney, gives the American Safe Company a kick in the—”

  “In short,” I interrupted, “you now had a secret that forevermore would make you a fortune?”

  “Oh—yeah? Say—do I look like I’m a millionaire? And say—how do you suppose a guy like me gets access to places who’ve got these here safes?”

  “Via second-story windows—looking out over prairie land, it seems,” I commented.

  “Yeah’ Well, all windows ain’t as nice placed as that one back o’ you. And some places that have Nixon-Duvalls are impreg­natable.”

  “Impregnable,” I told him. “But go on!”

  “I will. And I am!” He paused. “Well, not long after all this happens, I get fired. For letting my temper out ag’in an old secondhand one-dial two-tumblered safe that wouldn’t open—and taking a sledge to it—and putting its combo worse on the bum than ever. And now that I’m fired, I thinks, thinks I, that I’ve got a way of making a living at that! That is, if I can find where some o’ them Nixon-Duvall safes are at. And—” He paused. “Well, I write to the American Safe Company at Westover, Massachusetts. That is, me, I don’t write—no—but I get a guy in a rooming house where I’m living then to do it right—an’ on a typewriter. And I tell ’em I’m a free-lance safe salesman, and I’ve got a customer who’ll buy a Nixon-Duvall through me—if I can dig him up some local recommends. From about St. Paul and Minneapolis, that is, where he can check up on ’em. And they write me back a sort o’ snooty letter, saying they don’t hand out, as a rule, information like that—but just the same, you see, the sales manager is sucking around for a sale—and he does send me photostats of three—just a lousy three!—letters received from people in St. Paul and Minny. Satisfied customers who got those safes. So now I got 3 addresses, anyway, where there’s Nixon-Duvalls—for I ain’t yet seen the Minny Despatch story, you see, about that nitro found down here, and th’ police theories, and th’ fact that it couldn’t have been meant for this place because you folks here had a Nixon-Duvall, and—but the clipping’s here in my back pocket if you want to see it.”

  “Not now,” I told him. “I’ll read it in a few minutes. For the present I’ll take those facts on trust. Go on with the story.”

  “All right, I will. And—but say—if I do go on, I’m sort of maybe talking myself into the pen, as far as I can see. In case you—”

  “On the contrary,” I assured him, “you’re talking yourself out.”

  “Well—maybe. That’s what I’m counting on, anyway.” He paused. “Well, one of these safes was inside a mansion on Kenwood Parkway, in St. Paul, that was just prickling with about 40 dozen servants. I’d have caught a dozen slugs in my guts if I’d ever even flirted with that dump. Another of the 3 safes was in an old lady’s apartment on Aldrich Avenue. Yeah—in Minneapolis here. The third one was in a fraternity house on Charles Street, St. Paul—yeah—in the high numbers, where all the frat houses are. It—the house, I mean—had a name made up o’ three Roman letters—one of ’em, I think, was ‘pie.’ And so—” He gave a doleful sigh. “Listen—Jesus—do I got to go on?”

  “Yes. Go on. What the hell are you fretting about? Didn’t I tell you you’re talking yourself out of the pen?”

  “Well, Mr. King, if ’twas anybody but Square-Shooter King—as the Minny Despatch called you—that give me that assurance, I’d play the clam—and take my chances on this one rap.” He paused. “All right. I’ll proceed.” He paused again. “Well, I get into the fraternity house—without no trouble. A sharpened fire poker—ag’in a rear window. The collitch boys all out carousing because of some last-of-the-season football game that their collitch won that day. And dam’ if I don’t get the safe open! Me—Peter Givney—roustabout in a secondhand safe start—as good as—as Raffles himself. In fact, better! But—what a flop! Just a lot of initiation an’ hazing stuff laying inside—and six pennie
s. So goddamn mad, I was, I just left ’em lay. And closed her up like she was.

  “Well, then I try the old lady’s next. Yes, the old lady on Aldrich Avenue, Minneapolis. I don’t even use a jimmy. For she keeps one inside court window a few inches up day and night. So up on a couple of barrels—and in. That is, when I see her go out. To th’ op’ry. That is, it musta been th’ op’ry, because she was dressed like a plush horse, an’ carried a pair of spectacles on a long handle. And Jesus—am I stumped this time? I can’t make the box! Maybe, I think, the magic eardrums—as I call ’em now—are getting dim at last; still, what I really know is that that son-of-a-bitch of a safe is got some kind o’ stresses in th’ steel o’ th’ door—that knocks this here, now, magnetic floox business all scrooey. Or maybe th’ safe has got a little bit perm’ntly magnetized or something by standing up above some electric gen’rator in some basement. Or maybe by being rapped on, at midnight, with a hammer or something, when the earth is laying squarely between the North an’ South Pole. You see, Mr. King, as a kid I once had me a notion to become an electrician—and I studied a few installments of a cheap correspondence course on this stuff.” He paused. “But regardless of why I can’t make the box, I just can’t! Again and again, when I adjust some of th’ adjoining dials, I can catch that faint sound, like as if it’s in the steel of the door, and sounding like—like, as I told you—the apologetic cough of a lady fly when she makes off to her gent fly that she really hadn’t intended to be that kind of a fly—but I can’t seem to get it from all th’ dials. And because it seems to come up sometimes out of two sep’rate places on some o’ th’ pairs—it did that on that first Nixon-Duvall I practiced with in the shop—well then, you can’t absolutely verify th’ location of either place as being right, unless you can get th’ sound you’re looking for out o’ th’ whole 5 dials. Naturally! And it’s such a faintish, swishy sound—even in my magic eardrums—that you got to—well—you got to strain your guts listening for it. So I moves them dials back and forth across each other—trying and trying and trying—and no results. Jesus! And the old lady reputed to have bonds—stones—mazuma. Sure—I’ve checked up on her in the stores around there. And by God—she comes back after a few hours—from the op’ry—I hear her in the front hall—and I have to beat it. Which same thing I might just as well have did two hours before. For I’d failed. And I’m cert, if you ask me, that if I’d stayed there all night working that combo I’d still have failed. As a b.p. safe that particular Nixon-Duvall was a—a natural.”