Too Soon Dead (30 page)

She reached the door. She sat up against it. With a tremendous effort of will she reached up and slid one of the bolts over. She couldn’t reach the other one. She rolled over onto her stomach on the floor. A layer of black smoke now filled the room. I could hear the crackle of flames.

Slowly she pulled her legs under her as if practicing some obscure yoga exercise. She raised her body. She fell forward onto her face. It was painful to watch. In a minute she raised up again; this time she made it to an approximation of a kneeling position by leaning against the door. It was wonderful to watch. She raised her hand and reached the other bolt. She pushed it and it moved, but not enough. She pushed it again, and it slid free. She collapsed.

The door was pushed open and Garrett, ax in hand, came bounding in. Behind him came two or three drunken citizens, who were definitely not policemen. One of them stumbled over to me and peered at my face. “Where’s the booze?” he demanded.

I
t was two hours before the effects of Dr. von Mainard’s concoction began to wear off. Garrett and his soused platoon did a splendid imitation of the Keystone Fire Department, but they did manage to extinguish the blaze. Garrett searched von Mainard’s inner sanctum until he found a key of a strange pattern that worked on our handcuffs. Shoes and I were still unable to walk, so a pair of drunks carried us downstairs to the bathtub room to get us away from the smoke. Being helplessly carried down a flight of stairs by two men who can’t walk a straight line is better than any roller coaster for causing absolute panic. But we got down safely, and were gently laid on the carpet next to a recovering Cathy, who had wisely staggered down on her own. Brass and Garrett went off to explore the house.

In the meantime, although the fire had been put out, one of the drunks, or possibly someone on the street, called the fire department, which brought several fire trucks and the police. The firemen ran around chopping holes in the wall to make sure the fire was truly out, and the police asked many questions and stared curiously at me and Shoes. Brass mollified the police, who went away shortly after the firemen departed, leaving two men at the door and promising to send Inspector Raab along as soon as they could locate him.

Garrett came in and sat with Shoes and me until we regained the use of our bodies. He sang to us and recited poetry, mostly Kipling, Service, and Levy, as well as some of his own, to keep our spirits up. He did explain his timely arrival: He had become concerned and, as he put it, “tippy-toed up the stairs” just in time to hear us being captured. Upon which he trotted over to Lexington Avenue and rounded up the customers at a bar called The Shamrock, jumping up on a bar stool and, with spellbinding oratory, promising them free booze and maybe a good fight if they came with him. A dozen men had followed him from the bar and joined him in his assault on the clinic. Most of them were eight or nine sheets to the wind, and they had stumbled around enough to sound like a whole platoon of gendarmerie.

By six in the morning the rank and file of Garrett’s drunken army had gone home, except for two who had been laid out in the waiting room, having been rendered hors de booze after finding a cache of schnapps in von Mainard’s office. Cathy had recovered completely except for a headache and an abiding anger at von Mainard and all his works, and Shoes and I were more or less able to stagger about on our own. Garrett went forth into the world and returned with paper cups of coffee and an assortment of doughnuts, and we ate and drank of them and were glad.

At seven-thirty Inspector Raab showed up with a quartet of plainclothesmen, who began a systematic search of the building from the ground floor up.

“I won’t ask you how you got in here,” Raab said, after hearing an abbreviated version of our adventures. “We’ll assume that you were rudely snatched from in front of the building, and my old friend Shoes is with you to discuss the Giants outfield. That is your team, isn’t it, Shoes, the Giants?”

Shoes nodded without rancor. “Opposites attract, Inspector.”

“Quite right,” Brass agreed. “That’s just how it was.”

“Just what has been going on here?” Raab asked. “I mean, before you arrived?”

“I think I can tell you a little bit about that. Follow me,” Brass said. He led the way upstairs to the scene of our rerent excitement. “Through that door did the doctor and his cohorts escape.” He pulled at the door. “It is barred from the inside, but judging by its position, it can’t be more than three or four feet wide. From which I infer that it contains a ladder leading to the roof. Such forethought shows that they had an escape route planned, and are probably well on their way out of your jurisdiction by now. It also shows some sense of guilt, since you don’t plot your escape unless you have reason to think someone might be chasing you.”

“And just what is it I’d be chasing them for, aside from all the things we suspect but cannot yet prove?”

“We could begin with the kidnaping of Miss Fox. That should do to hold them for a while. And there is more. I’ve found several things that plant the finger of suspicion firmly on von Mainard’s nose.”

“Photographs?” Raab asked.

“No. I fancy von Mainard took those with him. But this,” Brass pushed open the door to the left, behind the row of metal chairs, “this would seem to be the location at which they were taken.”

The room was about twelve by twelve, with no furniture but a light-colored carpet. Rolled up in one corner was a large, white, fluffy throw-rug, with several oversized pillows perched atop. A large mirror was centered on the wall to the left, and the ceiling was mostly filled with a multipaned skylight of frosted glass, to discourage the prurient interest of anyone who happened to be restating the roof.

“The camera is mounted on a brace on the other side of the mirror, which is one-way glass,” Brass said. “The wonders of modern science once more serving to improve the condition of mankind.”

“So the Mainard Clinic was just a front for a whorehouse for the affluent,” Raab said, looking into the empty room with disapproval.

“No, no, much more than that,” Brass said. “Do you know the story of Hasan ibn al-Sabbah, the ‘Old Man of the Mountain’?”

“The Arabian Nights
?” Raab suggested. “Isn’t that one of the tales?”

Brass decided that he wanted more relaxed surroundings for his storytelling, so we followed him back downstairs and settled in the overstuffed furniture in the waiting room. “It is not a tale at all in the sense that you mean,” he told Raab. “Hasan ibn al-Sabbah was the leader of a secret sect known as the Hashshashin in eleventh-century Persia. From a fortress called Alamut—‘the Eagle’s Nest’—high on a mountain in central Persia, he terrorized the Muslim, and much of the Christian, world. His followers were few but much feared and completely dedicated to his will. That their name is the root of our word
assassin
should give you some idea.”

“Charming,” Raab said, “but I don’t see the relevance.”

“Patience,” Brass said. “Hasan got this complete obedience from his disciples by telling them that, if they died bravely in his service, they would go to Paradise, where they would feast on rich foods and be serviced nightly by beautiful houri. And they believed him because he had taken them there once to give them a foretaste of what was to come.”

I had been staring at the ceiling, but now I looked over to Brass. “He what?” I asked.

“The word
hashshashin
means ‘hashish eater,’” Brass said. “Hasan would drug his faithful followers with wine doped with hashish and take them into a secret garden hidden in his palace. There they would taste of all the delights that he had promised them. The next morning they would wake up in bed, and Hasan would tell them they had been to Paradise.”

Raab was skeptical. “And they believed him?” he asked.

“They did,” Brass assured him. “Why not? Would their leader lie to them? And they would gladly die for him—because they knew where they were going.”

“I can believe it,” I said. “Look at some of the people who are being blindly followed today, without even drugged wine as an excuse.”

Alphonse “Shoes” Mallery appeared in the doorway with his overcoat bundled under his arm. “I’ll be going now, if there’s no objection,” he said. “It’s been a fascinating night.”

Brass waved at him. “I thought you might,” he said. “Go in peace.” Shoes waved back and headed out the door.

Raab had been thinking over Brass’s narrative. “Are you saying that’s what was happening here?”

“Sort of,” Brass said.

“Von Mainard was turning a group of middle-aged politicians and executives into an assassination squad?”

Brass grinned. “A wonderful image,” he said, “but no. The not-so-good doctor has apparently developed a drug, or combination of drugs, that will release inhibitions in the user and induce a quasi-dream state. It’s what he was going to give me. With my inhibitions removed, I would have told him anything he asked. But what he was using it for with the senator and the judge and the lawyer, all of whom shall henceforth remain nameless, was to induce pleasure. They would all remember in a sort of foggy way that they were alone in a room with a lovely girl, or in one case, boy, who made love to them. Non-judgmental, nonthreatening, with no responsibilities; just pleasure.”

Raab thought it over. “Well, drugs or no drugs, any court in the state would see it as prostitution and pandering, which is good for a few years in the joint. I guess he took those photos without his, ah, patients’ knowledge, but if he hasn’t actually tried to use them yet, we can’t get him for blackmail.”

“I think his goals were more ambitious than that,” Brass said. “His drugs cause a state of extreme suggestibility. My guess is that he was going to suggest things to them while they were under the influence.”

“What sort of things?”

“That is the question. Judges, attorneys, senators—what sort of things indeed. And the secretly taken photographs were for extra persuasion, should such prove necessary.” Raab sat up. “Speaking of senators… I had lunch with Colonel Schwarzkopf yesterday. We discussed Senator Childers.”

“And?”

“Schwarzkopf was very circumspect. He didn’t actually
say
anything. But the impression he managed to leave me with was that the senator does not have a record of sadistic treatment of women.”

“Does not?”

“Does not have a record,” Raab reiterated. “But off the record, there is the suggestion that he has paid large sums of money to several women to keep charges from being filed. Apparently the senator loses control occasionally in what would otherwise be just a little playful spanking. I believe in the trade it’s called ‘the English vice,’ but Childers occasionally takes it to an un-English extreme.”

Brass nodded. “One man’s foreplay is another man’s five years in the penal institution of the state’s choice,” he commented. “Just one more thing that money can buy.”

Three shots, one after the other, sounded dull and distant from somewhere outside. Raab jumped up and ran for the door, Brass and I right behind him. We paused in a clump at the front door at the thought that the shots might be aimed in our direction.

The two uniformed officers who had been at the door were standing in the street with their guns drawn, staring up at something over our heads. Inspector Raab drew his revolver. “You two stay here until I find out what’s happening,” he whispered, and cautiously made his way toward the curb, looking up at the building.

More shots from overhead, louder now that we were outside. And then a continuous firing, every few seconds for what seemed like ten minutes but was probably less than one. I could make out two distinct weapons being used; one had a higher-pitched
crack
than the other, but what they were I couldn’t have said.

After a pause of another minute, a head appeared on the rooftop, looking down. For a moment it surveyed the street. And then a voice called, “Inspector Raab?”

“Yes?” Raab called back.

“It’s Framingham. You’d better get up here.”

We were two steps behind Raab as he ran upstairs. One of the detectives was on the phone to Bellevue when we entered the third-floor room, and he gestured toward the far door and continued telling the other end of the phone where to send the ambulances.

The door that von Mainard had escaped through had been battered open, revealing a closet-sized room with a wooden ladder fastened to the far wall. Brass was right again. Raab went up the ladder and Brass and I followed. The roof of the building was the usual flat, tarred surface with various pipes and oddments sticking up randomly and a knee-high wall around the edge. A plainclothesman was sitting on the tar a short distance from the ladder, clutching his right leg with both hands, a look of fierce concentration on his face. Blood was slowly oozing out from under his hands.

Framingham was standing by the side wall, his hands on his hips, staring across at the next building. We joined him. “What the hell was all that?” Raab asked.

Framingham pointed. There was a three-foot gap between the clinic roof and the next rooftop, an easy jump. Three men were lying in various positions at the far corner of the next roof, blood pooling under them. “They started shooting at us as soon as we came up the ladder,” he said. “So we started shooting back. They lost. I don’t even know who the hell they are.”

“It’s Dr. von Mainard and his two associates,” Brass said.

“So. What the hell are they still doing up here?” Raab turned to Framingham. “Cover me!” He jumped the gap and cautiously approached the bodies. They remained dormant as he squatted by each one, holding the back of his hand in front of each nose. “This one’s alive,” he said, indicating one of the thugs. “I think the other two are dead, but we’d better get them downstairs just in case.”

Brass jumped across with studied nonchalance. I followed, trying not to let the fear show on my face. A three-foot jump is a snap, but when the gap is a three-story drop to the street, it becomes more imposing. I went over to look at von Mainard. He looked dead to me, a wide stain of blood across his chest, which had already stopped flowing, and an angry, puzzled look in his eyes, sightlessly staring into eternity or possibly at the water tower on the roof across the street.