The Mystery of the Fiddling Cracksman Read online

  “Yes.” She looked down at him, as though hoping he would say what he was going to say.

  “Then I suggest you make up a bed for me on the couch in his study, and I and the blunderbuss will hold the fort for the rest of the night. ’Liza isn’t much use to anybody in a case like this—but she functions one hundred per cent as a chaperon. I’d hesitate to suggest this, Laral—if she wasn’t in the house.”

  “Yes, I know, Billy. But that makes it quite all right—even to the finest-spun canons of the Social Register!”

  He smiled up at her. “Then—as I said—it’s all agreed. I’ll hold the fort in the study for the rest of the night. If nothing happens—all right; we’re nothing out. But if by any chance that lunatic nut comes prowling around here—then there’ll be something more on the job than a helpless girl—and a deaf old black woman.”

  Laral’s face flooded with a look of tremendous relief. “It’s—it’s an injustice to you, Billy, to make you sleep on a strange bed—and a hard couch, at that—when you’re all tired out from that New York voyage. But—but you have no conception of how unstrung I really feel. And I just can’t help but take you up on this—if you’re still will—”

  Hemple raised a hand.

  “Say no more, Laral,” he ordered. “It’s agreed. So that ends it. Now let’s talk about more pleasant things. Or suppose you play a little piano music for me? I like you—because you don’t dip your music up out of a radio.”

  “You really like me a lot, don’t you, Billy?” she asked, gazing at him with a curious, wide-eyed solemnness.

  “Like you?” he echoed. “Well—would I be wanting to marry you—if I didn’t?”

  She stared down at his own quizzical upraised face. But did not smile.

  “Suppose, Billy,” she said, “that I should tell you that neither you nor I—nor even Father—has the ultimate say on—on our getting married? That it all lies in the hands of a man whom I scarcely know—and probably will never see again.”

  “A man—whom you don’t know—will probably never see ag—why—what—who is the man?”

  “His name is Samuel Hoggenheimer,” the girl replied quietly. “And he owns about all the vaudeville theaters that are left in America today!”

  CHAPTER IV

  A Dissertation on—“Life As It Is Not!”

  Billy Hemple stared up from his chair at his fiancée. The girl who wore his ring. And who had just told him, in a sense, that she wasn’t exactly—a fiancée. That is—he screwed up his face into a hopeless frown. Her words were about ten thousand times further above his head than was the delicate oval face looking down at him from, the chair handle.

  “I—I—I don’t get it, Laral. You’ll—you’ll have to make it clearer than that. If he’s a man you hardly know—and never will see again—why, he can’t have much bearing on our future. It stands to reason. So—”

  She slipped off the chair handle, and drawing up a little gilt-legged chair close to him, seated herself on it, in the lamplight, where they could face each other.

  “It just sort of looks, Billy, as though it’s time now for confessions—of a sort, that is—between the two of us, doesn’t it? So you begin. And I’ll follow. You want to marry me. And—believe it or not!—I really want to marry you. But maybe—” She broke off. “And now your obstacle is beautifully removed: your book is accepted. And you’re on the royal road upward. So isn’t it about time I hear—about that book?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “It is. Considering that it was the key that unlocked our future for us.” He paused, still puzzled by her quiet words of a few moments ago. Then he decided right off that they embodied some girlish whim, which when analyzed, would turn out to be nothing but foolishness that would evaporate at the first breath of reason.

  “Well,” he began, “in the first place, I have to give your father credit—in a way—for the existence of my book. Maybe for my whole future. For I got to thinking one day about his prospective Merged Mathematics, A New Psychological Approach to the Physical Sciences—and the idea seized hold of me of what a great satirical stunt might be worked out if three of the greatest pieces of hyper-melodramatic super-pulp-paper twaddle that have ever been penned were merged together. I refer to those old pieces of creaking clap-trappery, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Graustark. The three classical ‘’orrible h’ex-amples,’ so I term them, of life as it is not—and never can be.

  “And,” he went on, fervently, “God knows I ought to know that sort of pulp—and super-pulp—melodrama. I was brought up in the care of an aunt and uncle who lived on the stuff. Ate it alive—so to speak. Aunt bought every George Barr McCutcheon book before it was even named in the publisher’s advance catalogue—and for days she stood in the doorway actually panting, wondering if some passing express wagon was there in the neighborhood to deliver her her copy. And if—or when—the wagon went on past the house, she’d run to her bedroom and weep great tears of disappointment. Uncle took positively every pulp-paper, mystery, thriller and detective magazine published in the United States—and he wouldn’t think of selling them later to the paper dealers at 20 cents a hundred pounds—God, no!—they were so precious that he—he kept them all stacked in great piles along the dining-room walls. I am confident, Laral, that he—and he alone—kept old Mr. Street and old Mr. Smith, the chief publisher offenders in that field of years ago, supplied with the silk hats that they were reputed to wear to church on Sundays.

  “Why—we were never known to have a meal on time. For Aunt would be devouring Uncle’s cheaper fiction—if she couldn’t find her own classical 15-cent fiction priced at 75 cents a copy in the reprint books. Like Charles O’Malley, the Irish Dragoon—or what have you! Or her 15-cent fiction priced at $2.00—hot off the McCutcheon printing presses! We never had a warm house except every other week. For Uncle and I had an arrangement—you see, I did have to go to school, and had to have time to carry a big load of homework lessons—well, we had an arrangement that he would run the furnace one week, and I the next. But God help us the week he ran it! I’d go downstairs into the cellar at 7:30 in the morning, with my teeth chattering—no breakfast as yet—for Aunt would be sitting in bed, wrapped up warmly in quilts reading about one of those damfool—pardon me, Laral, but ‘damfool’ is the word—Balkan kingdoms, thrilling to the love stories of incognito princes, and queens, and what not else—and there would Uncle be, sitting on a soap box with Complete Detective Novel Magazine, or Top-Notch, reading about thieves who stole nothing but carven brass Buddhas with jade eyes, or kidnaped professors who had run afoul of some band of criminals, or what not else. I particularly remember the day it was 20 degrees below zero—Uncle had gotten up just enough heat in the furnace to warm up the furnace room itself—the fire had gone out—and there he was, lost in a fool story about a character who, right off the bat—on Page 1—opened up a mysterious envelope and found in it an eight of hearts—and who keeled over thereupon in a dead faint. I remember it because every pipe in the house upstairs froze—and burst.

  “I did,” he went on, with a sigh, “used to ask Aunt and Uncle why they read such tripe. And when I used the word ‘tripe’ they nearly always burst a blood vessel—each of them—with rage and indignation. ‘These here stories, young man,’ they said, ‘is transcrip’s of life. Life what other people git—even if it don’t reach you. And if people didn’t ’sperience these here things—them stories wouldn’t never be conceived or writ. And if you too, young man, would widen your spear of emotionality and knowledgtch—you, too, should read them great romanticses.’”

  The girl laughed amusedly.

  “I tried reading those great ‘romanticses,’” Billy Hemple went on lugubriously. “And if it hadn’t all been so tragic—that we never had a meal on time—or a warm house—I would have split my sides laughing. For I found that Monte Cristo, The Prisoner of Zenda, Graustark—and those wild pulp-paper sto
ries that Uncle devoured, were all horses of the same color; members of the same literary family; depictions of life as life never was, is, or by any stretch of the imagination can be. Just awful, Laral. Like for instance—a poor student goes into a Chinese restaurant, orders an 85-cent table d’hote dinner, opens up a walnut in the last course—and inside it finds a plan, drawn on a paper napkin, and signed by the mad Lama of Tibet, to seize Greenland and make it pan-Buddhistic! No, I’m not fooling, I tell you. Or like—like for instance—a flashlight picture of—say—the Dusk Club, at the Hotel Knickerbocker, in New York City, is developed, and the photograph of Mrs. Lester Banks, wife of the candidate for New York’s Mayor, is missing; and in its place is a picture, identified by Gregorio Saltini, the great Orientalist, as—as the lost bride of Ghengis Khan! No, I swear I’m not fooling. Again, a house on Washington Square—whether the Square is the one in New York, Philadelphia or Chicago doesn’t matter—that never bothers fictionists!—is never occupied; and nobody knows who lives there. And every morning a giant ape swings himself down from the skylight by a rope, cleans the stoop and polishes the doorbell which is never rung. And one night Henry Chiswold, the hero, going past, sees in one of its window shades the silhouette of his fiancée, Anne Warrington, and—”

  “Oh Billy—surely—surely you never read that one?”

  “Well—well maybe not,” he admitted. “But darned near it, I tell you. I know I read the other ones. And I know positively I read one yarn about a geometrician who was found swimming in the octopus tank of the New York Aquarium; and it turned out that he was swimming there because somebody had stolen his formula for trisecting the angle—a secret for which mathematicians had sought for ages—and he wanted to be committed to an asylum—whose superintendent he suspected of being the thief—and who turned out to be the thief. Gosh, Laral, from Monte Cristo—with the Count chopping himself from out of his bag beneath the waters below the castle—down to Nickel Novel Magazine, with its mysterious, masked villains perpetually doing which-what and what-not—I got an inhibition against this sort of stuff which makes me nearly get nauseated every time I think of people digesting it as—as a picture of life.

  “Not to omit,” he went on without pausing for breath, “the more subtle aspects of the case: that always—in this type of fiction—high or low—it possesses a close-knit weave—known as ‘plot’—between all its characters and villains and heroes and who not—quite unknown to them themselves, of course—a weave that not even the Olson Rug Company, over on our West Side here, who turn old rags into carpets—could spin. One set of events is running along one thread—like bricks consecutively knocking other bricks in a row down. Another is running along another thread—again like another row of bricks. Each row of bricks crosses still another row of quiet bricks. Each falling row starts the bricks in the quiet rows toppling over in two—no, four—different directions. Come knots—where no knots were before; events—back of events; chapters that even the poor hero isn’t permitted to view; chapters about chimpanzees—and theatrical producers—and kings—and policemen—and cornet blowers—all weaving together so tightly and inevitably that the hero and heroine are as good as married to each other—or to someone else, as the case might be—before they even get acquainted with each other. Why—confound it, Laral—in an analysis of 2000 pulp-paper stories I found that 211, or 10.55 percent, had an actual Chinaman moving in back of the scenes—a bird who just as good as controlled the fates of half the characters. Moreover, in 33.45 percent of the cases where he appeared, he was named Wong! Which is the Jones, you know, of Chinese names. I met the old boy so many times, I tell you, that I finally got to calling him Old Cholly Destiny. Why—in such stories the main characters—the ones whose thoughts are directly visible to the reader, so to speak—are hamstrung so far as dictating their own affairs goes. Free will—the only real and certain thing that exists in the world—is absolutely negated in this kind of stories. The authors absolutely get bald inventing countless motivations—as they term them—to induce each character to do exactly what he must do so that the story will all ‘come out’—as they call it. Quite aside from all the old Cholly Destinies—of whom, if they ever all came together at the same time—there would be enough for a bloody tong war lasting a full week!

  “I don’t know,” Billy Hemple went on, warming up to his subject, “but that the Graustark stones gave me the biggest laugh of all. That Balkan Kingdom stuff touched some sort of invisible funny bone that I had. Even in those days I had a half of an idea that some day I’d tackle a burlesque of Graustark alone—even if I had to publish it myself. And I—”

  “But there are, Billy,” the girl put in, “tiny kingdoms just like that in the Balkans, aren’t there?”

  “Oh—sure. Yes. A few, that is. Around the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. Yes. Kingdoms that don’t even get heard of in world-peace and world-armament conferences, simply because they go right along with their vote with some larger adjacent kingdom like—like—say Bulgaria—or Yugoslavia. Little animalcules of monarchies too blamed small even to get into our newspapers—until they make the front page as one of them has done, you’ll notice, in the last five months—but I forgot—you’ve been off all newspapers for five months. Though why you’ve been off, I still don’t know. But speaking of the mythical one again—Graustark—it might interest you to know that I actually met George Barr McCutcheon, its creator, himself, when I was a youngster. Just for about a minute, you understand. At a luncheon at the Midland Club. A literary chap here in Chicago took me, and got me the introduction. Of course the big man—George Barr—didn’t grant me but a few passing words of greeting at most—but I did manage to get in a question. Lord knows I’d starved and frozen for years because of his fool Graustark. ‘Mr. McCutcheon,’ I said, ‘did you have any particular real kingdom in mind when you wrote Graustark—or was your fictional kingdom wholly imaginary?’

  “He looked at me kindly. And put his hand on my shoulder. And he said, ‘Yes, son, I did have one in mind—categorically, at least, from the point of view of general unheard-of-ness! And if you’ll go home and look on your map for a little kingdom called Ulania—you’ll have the one that stimulated me to write my Graustark stories.’

  “To which, Laral, I would jolly well have liked to have added ‘and kept my aunt hot-and-bothered all her life.’ But I didn’t. Besides which, somebody came up and carried the great man off!” He paused a second. “Well, in spite of his kindness to me in answering my question so frankly—I was peeved at McCutcheon for nearly three months. Because when I got home, I looked on about four maps. And one, a really large fine Rand-McNally and Company map, too, showing the whole layout of Europe since the Versailles Peace Conference. And there wasn’t a sign of Ulania on any of them, including the Rand-McNally map. Besides which, in a sort of condensed encyclopedia I had—Swanson’s Short-Cut Encyclopedia, if you’re familiar with it—Ulania wasn’t even mentioned.

  “But one day,” he continued, “I was going through the Public Library. Through that long white marble corridor that connects the general reading room with the stairway leading down to the circulation room. And I passed a great map about 20 feet long—and 15 feet high. You probably have seen it there yourself. A map of Europe. It’s on the left wall and occupies darned near the whole left wall of that corridor. And I took a look for general good measure. And—by Gosh!—there was an area not as big as a postage stamp—even on that huge scale—and postage stamp kingdoms, I’m telling you, are good names for such places as Lichtenstein on the Rhine—and Monaco, on the Mediterranean,—where Monte Carlo, of course, is—and Ulania—and so forth. But anyway, there it was. Tinted, for a wonder, separately from the area around it. And labeled Ulania. My first concrete assurance that George Barr hadn’t been giving me a polite run-around! And I beat it on back into the reading room, and sure enough, in the good old Encyclopedia Britannica—thank God for it!—there was a little half-column article on the place, anyway.” br />
  “And so,” the girl commented amusedly, “George Barr was exonerated?”

  “Yes,” Billy Hemple acknowledged, “I guess he was.” He paused. “And that was that.” He paused again. “Well, as I was trying to convey before I got onto that tack, I boiled inwardly for 15 long years—at home there with Aunt and Uncle—about the public being fed this sort of tripe—and when I say tripe, I mean the so-called great pieces of tripe right on down to the little pieces that run in Nickel Detective Magazine—for they’re all sliced off, I tell you, Laral, from the same ham. But it wasn’t until after I met your father, and he told me about his Merged Mathematics—that the odd idea came to me that if the three old classical stand-bys were fused together—”

  “What do you mean, Billy? Fused?”

  “Well—I mean if all the wild woolly high spots—from the Balkan kingdom of Graustark, to the revenge motif in Monte Cristo, and the stolen jewels, and so forth and so on—were plucked out and re-combined into a new plot—it would be a—a—a sort of ribtickler. Specially when combined with some of the standard Street and Smith pulp-paper situations, like the hero’s search for the missing man who is the sole key to a mysteree!—and the character who opens an envelope, and finds in it an eight of hearts—oh yes, I put that one bodily into Mr. Monte Zenda, of Graustark—and a couple dozen others, including, of course, old Cholly Destiny himself.