Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 11, November 1960

Run, Murderer, Run! by Bryce Walton

“Long live the King!” is the cry of loyal subjects. Assassins or regicides, however, express themselves somewhat differently.

I sat in the winged leather chair sipping Armagnac, an excellent wine rather soured by the ugliness of my host. He waddled to a decanter tray and the mere effort involved in picking up a bottle of whiskey made him wheeze.

I loathed abnormality. Distortions of human figures sometimes actually filled me with a nauseous horror. And Mr. Muruk was a genuine bundle of zinc-gray suet.

He settled behind a teakwood desk and glanced at an antique clock on the wall. “Exactly on time, Mr. Weston.”

“And I’d rather not waste it on unnecessary preliminary details,” I said. “I’m interested first of all in the price you’re offering.”

“You Americans. The price must be right, eh?”

I glanced through the ceiling-high windows at an edge of the UN building, silhouetted above the East River. “I don’t want you to underestimate the value I place on killing a man, Mr. Muruk. And also don’t want any awkward repercussions to result from our interview.”

Mr. Muruk gave one of those very eloquent Far Eastern shrugs. “You have a fine reputation in your field, Mr. Weston. A cautious and conservative and successful man. I should think you would be financially secure.”

“Not quite,” I said. “You see, I’ve never operated on any quantitative basis. I get no personal pleasure directly from my work. It’s never very exciting or stimulating and it’s often dull. It’s strictly a business. I do it for only one reason — financial gain. But I’m very selective and I operate on a strict qualitative level. For, you see, I have a deep conviction about killing.”

“What is this conviction?” asked Mr. Muruk.

“A sensitive and sane man can allow himself only a certain number of killings. Beyond that, he’s absolutely corrupted. I know that one more is all my conscience, such as it is, will tolerate.”

“So this job must be conclusively rewarding. I see, Mr. Weston.”

“I need enough from this one to retire,” I added.

Mr. Muruk grunted and lifted a leather bag to the top of the desk and slid it toward me. “I don’t represent some small organization or an individual,” he said. “But a nation, my own country. For a purpose such as this, we can allot considerable funds.”

I snapped open the bag, pleasantly taut with crisp packets of fifty dollar bills.

“Count it if you wish, Mr. Weston. Fifty thousand, would that be an adequate persuader? Fifty thousand more if you succeed? In unmarked American cash?”

I hesitated.

“Count it if you wish?”

“Oh no,” I said. It was more than enough, I decided, and there was no sense in traditional quibbling. “We’re in business. I must ask you to make the briefing as quick and to the point as possible. And another things, before there’s any further commitment. I never use a gun. Guns are dangerous and noisy. They’re also gross and unpleasant.”

“I know.”

“I prefer a job demanding the simplest and least brutal method.”

Mr. Muruk nodded. “So do we.” He sighed and waddled back to the decanter and poured more whiskey. “We have tried many approaches. All of them, subtle or otherwise, have failed.” He drank and shuddered, almost imperceptibly. “A number of internationally reputed gentlemen of your profession have been interviewed by me and sent out from almost every important capital city in the world. Failure, sir, failure every time. To say the least, our proposed victim seems to bear a charmed life.”

I smiled. “You Europeans have over-indulged perhaps. As with too much whiskey or too many women, sensitivity and imagination become blunted by excess. Couldn’t it be that repeated murders en masse squeezed the small individual job out of focus?”

“Maybe you are right,” Mr. Muruk said. “And a fresh direct American approach is what we need. Fortunately our victim’s coming to New York has made you, with your American vigor and calculated zest, available for testing.”

“There is nothing easier than killing a man,” I said. “It can be as simple as stepping on a cockroach. But it must be detached. A mere job that is never an end in itself.” Mr. Muruk smiled. “The price takes care of everything.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Are you interested in international politics, Mr. Weston?”

“Hardly at all. But I read the papers.”

“Then you may be familiar with a small Near Eastern country rich in oil and ignorance. It is called Balikshar.”

“Yes,” I said. “King Asazian.”

Mr. Muruk nodded gloomily through the window. “Little King Asazian. You may know that five years ago he was ousted by a revolution without being assassinated, or formally surrendering his claim to rule. He was stabbed some twenty times and shot once, but proved, then as now, to be astonishingly durable,”

“I don’t see what it has to do with my job now,” I said.

“Impatience isn’t supposed to be part of your character.”

“I don’t like a thing cluttered up with nonessentials,” I said. “I can’t possibly share your motives, for wanting King Asazian eliminated. Can’t we dispense with background data?”

“Time hasn’t dulled my emotional involvement,” Mr. Muruk said sadly. “You see, he claims to be the King of Balikshar in Exile. As long as he remains alive, he will command a considerable and dangerous following in my country. Counter revolutions are a constant irritation.”

“It still adds up only to his being here alive,” I said. “I fail to see that it means anything else as far as I’m concerned.”

“Of course, Mr. Weston. But I must point out that, being an international figure, he is always under heavy Federal and local, round-the-clock guard. Particularly here in the United States. Because your government is especially sympathetic with his cause, not ours.”

“I expect legal inconveniences and other obstacles,” I said.

“He’s a patient in a Long Island hospital undergoing complex surgery. I’ll give you the pertinent details. He came here for special treatment, just as he has visited every major city in the civilized world for some specific medical or surgical need. King Asazian is a very old man, Mr. Weston. I wouldn’t presume to say how old, no one knows. Let me only say that our efforts should not normally be necessary. He should long ago have died from natural causes.”

I helped myself to a bit more of the Armagnac.

“A number of countries are noted for specialists in various fields, including medicine and surgery. King Asazian has had both the desire and financial means to take advantage of such specialists. We have followed him from hospital to hospital from Moscow across the Scandinavian countries, to Vienna, France, England, Brazil. And now New York. At this Long Island clinic is a surgeon, supposed to be the best throat specialist in the world. Naturally, King Asazian selects only top men. Seems he contracted some malignancy of the neck, the vocal cords were affected, and he lost his voice. This is an insufferable handicap to a King whose only influence is through his ability to harangue crowds.”

I waited.

“He’s spent the better part of his roving exile in hospitals. The result of who knows what multiple afflictions. But oddly enough, we never before thought of using a hospital to dispose of him. He’s been confined to this Long Island clinic for over a week. Long enough for us to work out a plan for you. I shall outline it. You may approve, make any changes or elaborations you think fit.”

There were only a few minor changes that occured to me. Generally, it seemed a tight, simple plan. Before I left, Mr. Muruk gave me two envelopes, each of which contained ten thousand dollars in one hundred dollar bills, as bribe money. He also said, “We don’t know why our other attempts never worked out, Mr. Weston. Our operatives were either killed, or captured and disposed of, or imprisoned one way or another before we could determine the cause of their failure.”

Failure, for whatever reason, held no interest for me, so I had no comment to offer. Many are called, but few are chosen. My only feeling for those inept predecessors was one of gratitude, for having tossed King Asazian and a hundred grand my way.

It was then ten in the morning. King Asazian was to reach the end of his unnaturally prolonged existence at between eight-fifteen and nine o’clock that night.

I put the fifty thousand away in my safety deposit box on Fifth Avenue and spent four relaxing hours in the Museum of Modern Art. A special showing of massive abstract canvases intrigued me. They covered entire walls and were unframed. Standing there, I felt somewhat uneasy as a result of my immediate understanding of the artists’ meanings. Their hugeness invited the viewer to step into them and become absorbed, carried away, lost in the meandering, endless complexity of space. And the fact that they had no frames further increased this sensation of something without bounds, as if each painting extended onward and outward forever. The artists were, in other words, inviting me to move out into the new space age, finite man shooting away and becoming lost in infinity.

Aside from a certain insecurity, a sort of cool draft on the back of my neck, I was pleasantly reminded of the fact that I would retire the next day. I would have a lifetime ahead of me, and sufficient wealth to spend my days leisurely roaming the world absorbing culture, art, and ideas.

I dined early at a small exclusive restaurant on 46th Street, calf’s liver a la française followed by a bottle of rich Moselle which I lingered over while rehearsing the routine outlined by the repulsive Mr. Muruk.

Visiting hours ended at eight P.M. King Asazian had not been having many visitors. If he happened to tonight, they would be cleared out by eight-fifteen at the latest. There followed an immediate check by nurses and a doctor. That was the regular schedule. I would, at nine o’clock, greet the police officer sitting outside, then go into room 304, where King Asazian waited. It would be at least another hour before another scheduled round from the night nurse. Actually, only a minute or so would be required for me to accomplish that which had so stubbornly defied nature, time and man.

At seven-thirty I went by cab across the river and out the Belt Parkway, off Exit 16 to Sunrise Drive where I got out. It was a clear starry night and cool for the middle of June. I walked a block down King’s Drive under the shade trees and waited on the corner. The ambulance drove up in less than five minutes.

Two attendants in white smocks and white trousers got out and walked up to me. It was an isolated spot, but they stood there for awhile, making sure no silent pedestrian was about.

“Muruk,” I said.

“Balikshar,” the smaller of the attendants said, a bit sullenly, I thought.

“Let’s have the money,” the larger one said crudely.

I handed each of them his envelope. Immediately they began counting and fingering the bills. Then the big one turned with a sudden enthusiasm and smashed his fist into the smaller one’s jaw. The victim fell on the grass, groaning. “Take it easy, for God’s sake,” he said.

“For ten grand you can take a beating,” the big one said.

“But I don’t wanna spend it all on doctor’s bills!”

He was then kicked in the ribs and lifted and smashed repeatedly in the face. He started to scream and then his nose smashed and covered his face and chest with blood. The victim passed out.

“That’s what I wanted,” the larger one said, rubbing his knuckles. “Blood. It’s got to look right.”

“It looks pretty good,” I said as the victim was dragged away into the brush.

The bruiser returned and lit a cigarette and looked at his watch.

“You two friendly with one another?” I asked.

“Old buddies. We’re going to pool our take and buy us a filling station.”

“Such treatment could put quite a strain on friendship,” I said. “And what about the ten grand on him?”

“He snaps out of it, he’ll ache but then he’ll think of the ten grand and feel good. He’s got a place over there to hide the moola until things blow over a little. We figured it was best to separate.”

We walked back to the ambulance which I, together with henchmen, was supposed to have waylaid. I looked back once, a bit concerned about the man I was supposed to have beaten up and left unconscious. The attendant whom I was supposed to force at gun point to drive me to the clinic, opened the rear ambulance doors and told me to get in.

“Change into the doc’s uniform,” he added. “Put on horn-rimmed glasses. Most of the younger docs at our institution wear ’em.”

It was a situation in which I had no repugnance to conformity. I got in, sat on the stretcher bed, changed into white pants, white shoes, a smock that buttoned tightly in a clerical band around my neck. I put on the horn-rimmed glasses. I was not supposed to resemble any regular known staff member. Anyone walking around in a hospital in a doctor’s uniform is automatically assumed to be an absolute authority. No one would dare question it, nor would it occur to anyone to do so. Or so we hoped. Before putting my folded civvies in a paper bag, I took a slim switch-blade knife out and concealed it beneath my belt under my smock. Knives were clean, neat, fast and reliable. I had used them before and Mr. Muruk’s more clinical method might fail.

The attendant handed me a black plastic medical kit after we got into the front seat. There were three syringes ready for use, a loaded fountain pen which I placed in the breast pocket of my smock.

The first hypo, the attendant pointed, out, was for him. Soon as we parked at the clinic I was to let him have it. He handed me the key to the Oldsmobile which he said was the third car from the left as we drove in. After I finished, I was to walk out the rear exit, across the parking lot to the Olds and drive away.

If they questioned the attendant to the point where he got the hypo, he could show them the hypodermic needle puncture, and a subsequent blood test would reveal the stuff I had knocked him out with. He and his friend were, of course, to remain completely innocent throughout.

The gun with which I was supposed to have forced him to drive me to the clinic was on the floor in the front of the ambulance.

A mile or so from the hospital, the attendant set off the screaming siren. It amused me to see cars scrambling out of my way.

I understood that when King Asazian had been driven from the airport to the hospital, every foot of highway and byway had been lined with policemen, patrol cars, motorcycles, and even a few helicopters. Of course we missed all of that. But the hospital itself was under heavy guard. There were police cars in front and rear, uniformed patrolmen and plainclothes men gathered about like flies on a sugar cube.

The cop at the gate stopped us. He recognized the’ attendant behind the wheel and thumbed us through without bothering to look at me. Two more cops at the entrance to the parking lot took a closer look.

“Do you have a light, officer?” I asked.

He lit my cigarette and motioned us through. We drove across the parking lot, down the ramp and under the medical center. On the way in I checked the location of the cream-colored Oldsmobile. It was a rented car driven in early by a visitor who had walked off and forgotten it. Some friend of Mr. Muruk’s.

It occurred to me that if something went wrong I might have difficulty driving away. But there was no reason for anything to go wrong. I didn’t intend that anything should.

“Okay,” the attendant said. I stabbed the first hypo needle into his arm and pressed the plunger. “Oh man. I want no spinal from you, Doc!” He then collapsed into what appeared to be blissful deep sleep. It seemed that ambulance drivers often goofed off in that seat for awhile when they drove in. Therefore, he probably wouldn’t be disturbed for awhile. If he were, he would be woozy, incoherent, and would effectively stall for time if I needed any.

I got out and walked through a door, down a shiny waxed floor toward the elevator, mentally retracing the floor plan in my mind. I didn’t want anyone seeing me hesitate about directions. A cop stood by the elevator ogling a nurse who walked down the hall toward me. The cop twisted his gaze from her to me with reluctance. But he seemed to grow more interested in me as I approached.

“Oh, nurse,” I said brusquely.

“Yes, Doctor?”

“Do me a favor, please.”

“Why of course, Doctor!”

“Drop by the X-ray room as soon as possible and tell that nincompoop in charge to facilitate my report on John Stanley’s broken foot charts.”

“John Stanley, doctor?”

“That’s right. John Stanley.”

“I’ll get right on that, Doctor.”

“Thank you, nurse.” I smiled, turned abruptly, elbowed the cop to one side. “Pardon me, officer. This is an emergency.”

The cop jumped aside and I stepped in and pressed the 3-button. A nurse wheeling a rubber table said, “Good evening, Doctor,” as I walked down the third floor hall, turned right and headed for room 304 in the private ward. The cop seated in front of the door watching me was the only one in the hall besides me at first. Then a nurse came out of a room at the farther end of the hall, turned and started toward me at a pace that would have done credit to a snail. I checked my watch and slowed down, seemed to be deep in medicative thoughts. The nurse finally passed me with a warm greeting and disappeared around the turn in the corridor.

I took the fountain pen from the breast pocket of my smock and stopped in front of the still-seated cop. He was young, did not appear to be particularly stupid. But the important thing was that he might have been given very strict orders about who was and who was not to be admitted. Also his auditory sense was probably good and might hear questionable noises coming from room 304.

“Good evening, officer,” I said, and started past him toward the door.

“Sorry, Doc. I got to check your ID card.”

I turned. “Seems there’s an emergency here — and in the absence of Dr. Kildare, I was called in.”

“Sorry,” he said, smiling, as I pointed the fountain pen and pressed the discharge button, shooting a lethal spray into his eyes, nose and mouth. He collapsed at once, out cold as if he had been blackjacked. I got him balanced on the chair as if he might have been dozing or very relaxed, with one arm pushed as a prop through the back of the chair.

Then I went into room 304, shut the door, and lunged straight for the bed to prevent King Asazian from pressing an alarm button.

But the inert outline under the white sheet made no movement at all, not at first. There was the bulge of his slight stomach, the perfect V outline of his slightly parted legs, the arms each of which extended straight down at either side and each seeming to be at the same time, two or three inches from his body. As I took the second hypodermic syringe from the case and placed the case on the bedtable, I thought of King Asazian as being already a corpse covered with a shroud.

The complete stiffness and symmetry of his outline, his utter stillness, suggested anything but a living breathing human being even in its most comatose state. But then the little, yellow, hairless head moved slightly. The lips, like a split walnut, writhed back over the white porcelain shine of artificial dentures. The top edge of the sheet which covered his chin fluttered like a vein as his breathing heightened.

His eyelids snapped open. His left eye, just the left, rolled around and fixed itself on me. It was steady. There was fear, but also a bright piercing anger. It was black and bright as a shard of polished dark glass. His mouth stayed open. I heard desperate quick expulsions of air, voiceless gusts. Evidently, I thought, his vocal cords had not yet been reconstituted. This was a decided advantage to me. I could work without fear of his warning outcries.

Then the old uncontrollable revulsion at the sight of human distortion and abnormality began to work on me. I fought it. I had to fight it only a few seconds; then I would be out of there. It began to boil and twist in my stomach.

Reluctantly, I grabbed the upper edge of the sheet, pulled it down, gripped the King’s left arm. It went taut, assumed the formidable consistency of coiling steel cable. I jammed the needle, heard the sharp sping running up into my fingers. The needle was bent.

I felt sweat burst out of my face as I grabbed up the third needle. It was also the last. Not only was it a neat sterile way of killing a man, but it might result in the hospital being blamed for negligence, or no cause for the King’s death being discerned. If there was no alarm, and I walked out and drove away without attracting any particular attention, they would find King Asazian dead, that was all. I had injected air-bubbles into his veins, plus, for good measure, a subtle poison hard to detect. The cop outside could make up any Story he wished.

The King’s arm snapped from my grasp. I made several attempts before again managing to obtain a close grip on the oddly smooth and shining forearm. Again plunged the needle down.

I stepped back. I felt a threat of panic. The needle was bent double, and there had been no penetration whatever of the King’s flesh.

That eye kept watching me, widening slightly, narrowing.

His neck was invisible behind a thick cast. Not the familiar plaster of paris and gauze cast, nor the sort of cradle arrangement that supports broken and cracked necks. It seemed to be of shiny chrome with a series of regularly spaced perforated squares.

I drew the knife from beneath my smock and the blade snapped free. I had agreed to kill him, but had not restricted myself as to method. I moved slowly toward him, watching that single glaring black and penetrating eye.

Suddenly his arm shot up and reached for a button on the side of a console box setting on the bed-table. I jumped, grabbed the arm, jerked it savagely down over the edge of the bed. The effort sent me stumbling back across the room. Horrified, I still held his arm in my hand.

For some reason, although the fact was obvious, it was difficult for me to grasp its being an artificial limb. It looked genuine. But there were the cogs and fine silver wires and pulleys inside. The delicate snaps and clips on the shoulder.

King Asazian was reaching up with his head to press the button, the alarm button.

I was on him again, forcing his body away from the alarm button, then stabbing for his heart. I felt the metallic clang run like a shock up my arm and into my brain.

I heard an odd desperate cry escape from, me like the sound of a child in its sleep. I was suddenly frightened. I was more than that. I was nauseated and filled with a growing terror. I stabbed again and again. Then I realized that the knife blade had snapped, broken clean at the hilt.

There were those shining metallic scratches showing through King Asazian’s flesh-like exterior. But the scratches revealed some kind of thin but impenetrable metal alloy. I could not have known then, of course, that his rib cage had been removed to make way for countless operations, and had been replaced by metal plates. I didn’t try to reason it out either at that time. I had seized him by the throat and was trying to choke King Asazian.

Soon I drew back, trembling. If he had any recognizable neck at all, it was invulnerable behind its metal cast.

My hands were wet and I could feel sweat running down under my shirt. My time was running out. I stood there trying to control myself, trying to think clearly. I had been in difficult situations before. There’s always a way out if you think calmly, keep your head.

I could brain him. But there was nothing to club him with. I started toward the table. But I was afraid to use it. The alarm box fastened to it might sound off if I used the table for a bludgeon. There was nothing else, absolutely nothing else in the room that I could use to brain him with, except his arm. And somehow I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up off the floor.

The window. It was open. A three-floor drop would surely finish him. I pushed the window higher and unlocked the screen, turned, but I couldn’t touch his torso. I tried several times to scoop him up, but a revulsion seized me so powerfully that I couldn’t get my hands within a foot of his hideous hairless shiny torso.

I grabbed his leg and started to drag him from the bed.

I stumbled back and ran into the wall — the leg in my hand. I dropped it. It clanged hollowly and slid across the polished floor toward the door. It seemed that I could still hear the sharp twanging, as if a number of taut piano wires had snapped.

I tried to force myself back toward the bed. The idea of failure was no more agreeable now than it had ever been. But I found it impossible to move toward my intended victim. It was as though I were rooted in terror in one of those immobile nightmares. And all the time I watched his eye fixed on me, angry, condemning and deadly. That was it. It was a deadly arrogant and assured eye. And all the time I saw his body twisting slowly, his other arm coming over toward the button.

I simply could not touch him again. His other arm, his other leg, his entire body — if I grabbed them, I had no idea what would happen. And I had no desire to find out. I wasn’t the first to fail to eliminate King Asazian, and I probably wouldn’t be the last.

Then he laughed. Softly at first. Then louder and louder. It became a throbbing thunderous sound pounding around the room. It grew even louder. I think I screamed, but I couldn’t hear myself.

I reached the door and started to open it. But his voice had aroused the entire hospital. I could hear voices shouting outside, and footsteps coming down the hall.

“Run, Murderer!” he began shouting at me. “Run, run, murderer! Murderer, murderer, run!”

He was still bellowing and laughing as I got through the window and clung to the sill. But I also heard shouts coming around the hospital and toward the darkness immediately below me. As I clung there, his voice blared louder until it reverberated and cracked like the voice coming from a faulty public address system.

As I dropped, the sound followed me. It filled the hospital and the night. Laughter. “Run, murderer!” Laughter. “Run, run, Murderer!”

But I couldn’t run even if I had felt a really intense urge to run. The fall had broken my leg among other things, and in any case, I was the center of attention of several uniformed cops.

I still hear him laughing and telling me to run. I hear him at unexpected and terribly disturbing moments. Sometimes in my cell. Sometimes while I’m out in the recreation yard. But more often in the middle of the night.

It isn’t a sound that I can tolerate very much longer. It is likely that I have heard it quite too long already. You see, it wasn’t a human, nor a purely mechanical sound. Either would, of course, have been perfectly tolerable. It was something like the hollow, atonal, imitation of the human voices that electronic engineers can now create out of sound waves and record on tape. Sound waves that were never titillated initially by any human vocal cords. Listen to such an icy mockery of a human voice; then imagine that only a slight trace of a genuine human voice is somehow imprisoned there.

It was not an alarm button. When he pressed that button, King Asazian switched on his newly installed electronic voice box. Full volume of course. They heard it throughout the hospital and people found — it quite audible a block away. Naturally, I had no chance at all.

I’ve considered the implications. King Asazian is still alive and only partly human. Or perhaps there is a point where a renovated, rebuilt human is no longer really human at all. I have no idea either, how long he will continue to present to the public what appears to be something alive.

What is he, the indestructible ruler of tomorrow? I know this — that he is the product of international specialists and scientific ingenuity of the highest order. And against such frightening international wonders, against such a thing as King Asazian, there is no longer any hope for effective action by such as I — the lone entrepreneur.