Too Soon Dead (29 page)

“The office first, I think,” Brass said softly, heading down the hall.

“What the hell are we looking for?” Shoes asked. “They don’t keep money in cribs like this.”

“Dirty pictures,” I told him.

Shoes shone his flashlight in my face for a second. “You ain’t smiling,” he said.

“It ain’t funny,” I told him.

Brass paused at the office door and turned to Shoes. “Ignore him,” he said, sounding annoyed. “We don’t know what we’ll find.”

Shoes shrugged. “Most guys have some idea what’s in a crib before they b-and-e. But it ain’t any of my concern. Mine is not to reason why,” he said. “Mine is but to pick locks and stand back.”

“See what you can do with this office door,” Brass said. Shoes went over and opened it—
click, click
—like it wasn’t locked, and the three of us went in. The office had two desks, one to the left and one to the right, and a row of file cabinets against the back wall. Brass started in on the file cabinets and I pulled out a couple of the desk drawers. Shoes contented himself with shining his flashlight on the pictures on the wall and making little appreciative clucking noises.

Earlier I had asked Brass to give me a better idea of what we were looking for besides photographs resembling the ones we already had, and he had told me, “Just ask yourself these questions: Does this tell us anything we didn’t know before? And, if so, is it worth knowing?” I went through the desk drawers methodically, asking the questions of everything I saw. I learned that the secretary used a shade of nail enamel called Rose Empassionata, and that she—I assume it was a girl—kept several pair of sheer black silk stockings in an envelope in the bottom drawer. I wouldn’t know whether it was worth knowing until I got a look at the secretary.

The desk yielded nothing else of even passing interest, so I crossed to the other one and pulled open the top drawer.

I found a rectangular case of stiff brown leather, about six by eight by two. I unsnapped it and pulled it open. It was lined with red fabric and was designed to hold snugly in place two hypodermic syringes, one medium sized and one large, and a row of needles, each with its own little glass needle-holder. The syringes were glass tubes inserted into silver frames with silver plungers. Just the sort of gift a doting mother might have given her son in medical school twenty or thirty years ago. Nowadays doctors preferred all-glass syringes, which had less places for germs to hide while they were auto-claved.

There was a clicking noise, and then another, and Shoes, with something approaching awe in his voice, said, “Well, I was wrong!” Brass and I turned. Shoes had swung aside an oil painting of a sailboat, revealing the wall safe behind it. He had also opened the wall safe, revealing the stacks of money within, all neatly wrapped and banded. “My fedora is off to you, Mr. B.,” Shoes said in an admiring undertone. “You did know what you were doing after all.” Shoes pulled out the stacks of bills and piled them up on the desk, counting under his breath. “We got maybe sixty grand here, give or take a dollar,” he announced. “Mostly twenties and fifties. All used bills.” He pulled a bill loose from its stack, rubbed it between his fingers, and then stared at it with the flashlight held behind it. “And not the queer,” he added.

“I’ll be damned,” Brass said. “There’s more money in psychiatry than I imagined.”

“Blackmail?” I suggested. “The doc in question is, maybe, putting the black on a bunch of Germans,” Shoes suggested, affectionately riffling one of the stacks.

“Germans?” Brass asked.

“Take a look,” Shoes said. He shined the flashlight on the paper band wrapped around one of the stacks. It was stamped with a stylized eagle perched on a swastika, with the words
Reichsbank Berlin
below.

“That is worth thinking about,” Brass said. “Put the money back now.”

Shoes stared at him. “What?”

“Put the money back, please. We’re not thieves.”

“Speak for yourself,” Shoes said.

“It’s important that they don’t know we were here,” Brass told him. “More important than the money.”

“To you.”

“That’s right,” Brass agreed. “To me.”

Shoes stared at Brass. “The way you’ve been moving things around, they’re going to sure as hell know somebody was here.”

“An inquisitive cleaning lady,” Brass said.

There was a long moment of silence, and then Shoes shrugged. “It’s your show.” He retrieved the stacks of money and jammed them back into the safe, at first grudgingly, but he grew increasingly cheerful as he completed the job and slammed the safe door closed.

We finished our investigation of the office in another few minutes, having found nothing further of interest, and retreated to the hallway. Shoes locked the door behind us. None of the other doors along the hall were locked, and none looked as though they were worth searching. “Upstairs,” Brass said.

The second floor contained the therapy rooms, each furnished to create a different illusion, foster a different aspect of the psyche, encourage the release of a different repression. There was the nursery, with an oversized blue crib; the schoolroom; the jail cell; the gym locker room with a row of wooden benches and steel lockers; and a room with a thickly carpeted floor and no furniture but an oversized bathtub in the middle of the room. “Does this stuff work?” I asked, staring at the bathtub.

“Do you mean is the tub functional?” Brass asked. “Probably. Do you mean is this therapy useful? If you believe it will help you, then it probably will. The mind can find all sorts of excuses for getting well, or for assuming rightly or wrongly that it now is well.”

“This is not the time for chatting,” Shoes interrupted. “Time is passing, and we got to get out of here before daylight.”

“You’re right,” Brass said. “Onward and upward!”

We proceeded up the stairs to the third floor and discovered a closed door at the head of the stairs. It was metal, it was locked, and it had a small peephole with a sliding panel that worked from the other side of the door. I had a hunch things were going to get interesting.

Things got interesting. Shoes had just started to work on the door when it was abruptly pulled open from the inside and three men stood facing us from the other side. Two of them were large, stocky, square-headed muscle men holding oversized automatic pistols, which they were pointing at us; the third was a smiling Dr. von Mainard.

We froze. It seemed the sensible thing to do.

For at least two complete eternities, from the creation of the universe to the heat death of our sun, nobody moved. Then one of the weight lifters gestured with his automatic, and we three filed past him into the hallway.

Von Mainard broke the silence. “Alexander Brass, I presume?” He gave a little rasping chuckle, as though he’d just said something clever.

“Dr. von Mainard,” Brass said, his voice more unconcerned than mine would have been. “An unexpected pleasure.”

“I could just shoot you, you know,” von Mainard said, his head nodding rapidly up and down in agreement with his thoughts. “Your American law allows me to do that to protect my home.
Bang, bang.
But first there are some things that I must know.”

The two goons prodded us down the hall and into a large white room decorated with five or six white metal chairs and a white metal table. There was a door in the far wall and two in each of the side walls. Against the wall to our right was a white metal cabinet with glass doors, which held several rows of stoppered bottles and various bits of medical apparatus. Cathy sat motionless in one of the chairs. Her eyes turned to watch us as we entered, but she gave no other sign of recognizing us or even being aware that we had come into the room. I must have shown that I was startled to see her, because von Mainard swung around and thrust his face a few inches from mine. “Yes?” he demanded.

His breath stank of tobacco and halitosis. I took a step backward. Now was not the time to discuss his dental hygiene. “Who’s the girl?” I asked.

He chuckled again. “Very good, Mr.—DeWitt, is it? As fine a bunch of burglars as I’ve ever seen. And just what did you expect to find in my little clinic?”

Shoes shook his head in disgust. “We rang,” he said, sounding aggrieved.

Von Mainard examined him with the interested air of an entomologist who has collected a hitherto unknown specimen. “I don’t believe I know you,” he said. “But I shall—I shall.” He rubbed his hands together. “We never answer the bell after midnight unless it is rung in a special manner.” He tapped on the table to illustrate the manner. “All others we ignore.”

The two bodybuilders searched us roughly and thoroughly, relieving Shoes of a small revolver and a sand-filled sock, and sat us down on the metal chairs. While one of them stood in front of us looking menacing with his automatic, the other came behind us, one at a time, and attached our arms firmly to the backs of the chairs with shiny silver handcuffs.

Von Mainard stood in front of Brass and peered down at him. “It is fortunate that we were here to receive you. I spent the evening at the penthouse of Senator Childers. A delightful man, the senator. Curiously, I returned here to question the young lady, who was detained after Hans recognized her from his little expedition to your office. But, as we have you now, I will go straight to the horse’s mouth, as you say.” He raised a hand to hush Brass, who had given no sign of being about to speak. “Do not attempt to say anything now. Whatever you say could not be trusted. I have more reliable methods.” He turned to the cabinet behind him and took a hypodermic syringe from its case. It was one of the newer sorts, without the silver chasing. “You should feel honored, you three,” he said, meticulously fitting a needle on the end and filling it from a glass vial. “You are being given the opportunity to test one of the latest advancements in interrogation procedures.”

The doctor approached me. I contemplated kicking him in the balls, kicking the syringe out of his hand, suddenly springing up, chair and all, and somehow overpowering von Mainard and his two henchmen. Heroes in the pulps did it at least once an episode. The Shadow and Doc Savage made it look easy.

One of the muscle men impassively came behind me and held his large gun to my temple as von Mainard pushed up my sleeve and thrust the needle into my arm and pressed the plunger. “This will not hurt you,” von Mainard said in a mild voice, the doctor reassuring his patient. “It will merely rob you of your volition, an appendage you have small use for at the moment, anyway. Later, and in another place, we will kill you.”

He moved away from me and wiped the needle down with alcohol, and then repeated the procedure with Alphonse. Sterility must be maintained, even unto the death. I tried to shift my head around to better follow the action, and discovered that I couldn’t. I was still completely awake and alert, but I couldn’t move anything but my eyes. It was as though my body had forgotten how to follow the instructions my brain was sending it. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the horrible conviction that I was going to forget how to breathe. I screamed—but no sound came out.

Von Mainard refilled his syringe from another bottle and again carefully wiped down the needle. “And now, Mr. Brass, a slightly different preparation for you. It will take longer to work, but it is more sure.” He pushed Brass’s sleeve up and aimed the syringe.

There was a sudden commotion from downstairs: the sound of running feet and raised voices.

With a gesture of annoyance von Mainard turned toward the door, listening, the hand holding the hypodermic now poised above his head. The sounds got louder. “Kurt,” von Mainard said, “go see what is happening!”

One of the muscle men stalked out the door. About ten seconds later he came running back in.
“Der verdammt Polizei!”
he yelled.

“So you did bring the police!” Von Mainard glared at Brass. “Well, I am prepared.” He thrust the hypodermic at Brass’s arm, but Brass twisted in his chair and kicked von Mainard’s hand. The hypodermic flew into the air.

Von Mainard cursed and slapped Brass across the face. “If I had time—no matter, there will be another time.”

“All right, men, upstairs—quickly!” came a barked command from below, followed by the thunderous footsteps of a horde of men racing up the stairs.

The two goons slammed and bolted the door, while von Mainard disappeared into one of the side rooms. In a few seconds he was out again carrying a stuffed briefcase. By this time men were up the stairs, pounding at the closed and bolted door. “Bring that ax over here, O’Malley,” cried the voice of authority from behind the door, a voice that I recognized.

Von Mainard and his cohorts ran to the door at the other end of the room and pulled it open. In a trice, or maybe a trice and a half, they were all through it and had slammed it shut behind them. There was the sound of hammering at the other door and then, after a few seconds, a methodical thunking sound as of an ax against metal.

I was content to sit and wait to be rescued; I had little choice. But then, after perhaps thirty seconds, I smelled smoke. By peering to the left as far as I was able, I could make out a thin haze of black smoke coming from the room von Mainard had been in. The haze thickened as I watched, and puffs of deep black smoke billowed into the room.

The chopping continued at the door, with nothing visible from this side to show progress. “Brass, DeWitt, are you in there?” the familiar voice called. It was Garrett. So near and yet so far. Would he get to us before the fire did? There were other questions, like what was he doing out there, and how had he roused the police, and I hoped to be able to ask him really soon.

“We’re here, Mr. Garrett,” Brass called. “Hold on a minute and I’ll get the bolts.” He tried to get up, and fell back into his seat. “Damn!” he called. “I’m handcuffed to a chair, and it’s bolted to the floor!”

Someone was moving. I turned my eyes and was able to make out Cathy lying on the floor, dragging herself toward the door. Her legs were not working, and her arms were not doing much; most of her painfully slow progress was by rolling herself from side to side and inching forward. It was the silliest-looking, most beautiful form of locomotion I had ever seen.