Cat of Many Tails

12

New York awoke and for a week or two the ugly vision tarried. Had radio’s celebrated planetary invasion of Earth been real, people would have stood in long lines afterward to view the Martian remains and wonder at their gullibility. Now that the monster was localized in a cage, where it could be seen, heard, pinched, reported, read about, even pitied, New York queued up. The clarity of hindsight engaged the facts of postmortem and out of it came citywide conversation pieces in shame, a safe and even enjoyable exercise for all. The Cat was merely a demented old man; and what was one lunatic against a city? File and forget; Thanksgiving was coming.

New York laughed.

Still, like his British cousin from Cheshire, the Cat lingered in his grin after the rest of him had vanished. It was not the grin of the old man in the cell; that old man did not grin. It was the grin of the dream monster. And there were the children, with shorter memories but fresher senses. Parents had still to contend with nightmares. Not excluding their own.

Then, on the morning after Armistice Day, the body of a young girl later identified as Reva Xavinzky, of Flushing, was found in various places about Jamaica Bay. She had been ravished, mutilated, dismembered, and decapitated. The familiar horrors of this case, its recognizably atrocious details, instantly diverted public attention; and by the time the murderer, an ex-Army deserter with a typical history of the sexual psychopath, was caught, the diversion — at least insofar as adults were concerned — was complete. Thereafter the word “cat” raised no grislier image in the mind’s eye of the average New Yorker than that of a small domestic animal characterized by cleanliness, independence, and a useful appetite for mice. (That the case of Reva Xavinzky, performed a like service for younger New York may be questioned; but most parents seemed to feel that with Thanksgiving and Christmas hovering, the Cat would be supplanted in their children’s dreams by turkey and Santa Claus. And perhaps they were right.)

There was a minority with special interests, however, who hung on. For some — certain City officials, reporters, psychiatrists, the families of the Cat’s victims — this was a matter of duty, or specific assignment, or professional or personal implication. For others — the sociologists, the psychologists, the philosophers — the capture of the nine-times murderer signalized the opportunity to launch a socio-scientific investigation of the City’s behavior since early June. The second groups were wholly unconcerned with Edward Cazalis; the first were concerned with no one else.

The prisoner had retreated to a sullen phase. He refused to talk, he refused to exercise, for a time he refused to eat; he appeared to exist only for the visits of his wife, for whom he called constantly. Mrs. Cazalis, accompanied by her sister and brother-in-law, had flown back from Florida on October 30. She had refused to believe the reports of her husband’s arrest as the Cat, protesting to reporters in Miami and New York that “there’s some mistake. It can’t be. My husband is innocent.” But that was before her first meeting with him. She emerged from it deathly pale, shaking her head to the press, going directly to the home of her sister. She was there for four hours; then she returned to her own apartment.

It was noted in those first excited days after the monster’s capture that it was his mate who took the full impact of the City’s animus. She was pointed out, jeered at, followed. Her sister and brother-in-law vanished; no one could or would say where they had gone. Her maid deserted her and she was unable to engage another. She was asked to vacate her apartment by a management that made it frantically clear they would use every means within their power to evict her if she resisted. She did not resist; she placed her household furnishings in storage and moved to a small downtown hotel; and when the hotel management discovered who she was the next morning, she was asked to leave. This time she found quarters in a lugubrious rooming house on Horatio Street in the Village; and it was here that her eldest brother, Roger Braham Merigrew of Bangor, Maine, located her.

Merigrew’s visit to his sister did not outlast the night. He had come accompanied by a shadlike man carrying a briefcase; when the two emerged from the Horatio Street building at 3:45 in the morning and found the reporters waiting, it was Merigrew’s companion who covered his factor’s escape and gave the statement which appeared in the newspapers later that day. “As Mr. Merigrew’s attorney I am authorized to state the following: Mr. Merigrew has attempted for several days to persuade his sister, Mrs. Cazalis, to rejoin her kin in Maine. Mrs. Cazalis refused. So Mr. Merigrew flew down to renew his appeal in person. Mrs. Cazalis still refuses. There is nothing further Mr. Merigrew can do, therefore he is returning home. That’s all there is to this.” Asked by reporters why Mr. Merigrew did not remain by his sister’s side in New York, the Maine attorney snapped, “You’ll have to ask Mr. Merigrew that.” Later, a Bangor paper managed to get a few words from Merigrew. He said, “My sister’s husband is insane. There’s no cause to stand by a murdering lunatic. It’s not fair to us, the publicity and so on. Any further statement will have to come from my sister.” The Merigrews owned large conservative business interests throughout New England.

So Mrs. Cazalis faced her ordeal alone, living in a squalid Village room, dogged by reporters, visiting her husband, and growing daily wilder-eyed and more silent.

She engaged the famous attorney, Darrell Irons, to defend her husband. Irons was uncommunicative, but it was rumored that he was having his hands full. Cazalis, it was said, “refused” to be defended and would not co-operate with the psychiatrists Irons sent endlessly to his cell. Stories began to circulate of maniacal rages, attempted physical violence, incoherent ravings on the part of the prisoner; those who knew Darrell Irons stated that he had inspired them and that most likely, therefore, they were not true. It was clear what Irons’s defense would be, for the District Attorney seemed determined to prosecute Cazalis as a man who knew the nature and quality of his acts, who had demonstrated in his daily life even during the period of his crimes his capacity to act rationally and who therefore, under legal definition, must be considered “sane,” no matter what he may have been under the medical definition. The District Attorney set considerable store, it was said, by the prisoner’s conversations with the Mayor’s Special Investigator and Inspector Richard Queen of Police Headquarters on the night of the Lenore Richardson investigation, when he had outlined his “theory” of the Cat case as pointing to a psychotic pure and simple. This had been the calculated act of a calculating murderer, the D.A. was said to hold, purposely turning the investigation into a channel of “gibbering idiocy” the more effectually to divert attention from the responsible mentality behind the stranglings.

A dramatic trial was forecast.

Ellery’s interest in the case flagged early. He had lived with it far too long at too steep a pitch to experience anything but exhaustion after the events of the night of October 29–30. He found himself trying not merely to forget the past but to dodge the present. The present, at least, would not to be evaded; it insisted on applying pomp to circumstance. There were Athenian honors, press and radio-television interviews, a hundred invitations to address civic groups and write articles and investigate unsolved crimes. He managed to back away from most of these with approximate grace. The few he could not avoid left him irritable and profane. “What’s the matter with you?” demanded his father. “Let’s say,” snapped Ellery, “that success has gone to my head.” The Inspector puckered; he was no stranger to migraine, either. “Well,” he said cheerfully, “at least this time it’s not caused by failure.”

Ellery continued to fling himself from chair to chair.

One day he decided he had located the infection. It was the boil of pressure. But not of the past or the present; of the future. He was not finished. On the morning of January 2, in one of the larger courtrooms under the gray dome of the Supreme Court building in Foley Square, a Mr. Justice-Somebody would make his blackrobed entrance from chambers and one Edward Cazalis, alias the Cat, would go on trial charged with murder. And in this trial one Ellery Queen, Special Investigator to the Mayor, would be a major witness for the people. There would be no release for him until that ordeal was passed. Then he could go about his business purged of the whole corrupting mess.

Why the trial should cause him such twinges Ellery did not attempt to diagnose. Having discovered — as he thought — the source of his malady, he adjusted his psychic screws to the inevitable and turned to other matters. By this time Reva Xavinzky had been collated and the spotlight probed elsewhere. He was able almost to relax. Even to think about getting back to writing. The novel he had neglected since August 25 lay in its lonely grave. He exhumed it and was surprised to find it as alien as any tax roll papyrus dug out of the Nile delta after three thousand years. Once, long ago, he had labored greatly on this, and now it had the historic smell of shards. Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Despairing, Ellery dropped the primitive effort of his pre-Cat days into the fire.

And sat him down to compose a newer wonder.

But before he could settle his feet on the bottom drawer, there was an agreeable interruption.

Jimmy McKell and Celeste Phillips were being wed and it seemed that Mr. Queen, in his single person, was to constitute the wedding party.

“Exclusive,” grinned Jimmy, “by McKell.”

“Jimmy means,” signed Celeste, “that his father hit the roof and won’t come.”

“He’s biting the Chippendale,” said Jimmy, “because his hitherto invincible weapon — disownery? disownment? — has turned to womanish water in his hand, now that I’m buckled into Grandfather’s millions. And Mother’d no sooner got over sopping up the tears than she started planning a twenty-thousand guest wedding. So I said the hell with it—”

“And we got our license, we’ve taken our Wassermanns—”

“Successfully,” added Jimmy, “so would you hand my bride over to me in City Hall at 10:30 tomorrow morning, Mr. Q?”

They were married between the Arthur Jackson Beals of Harlem and the Gary G. Cohens-to-be of Brownsville, Brooklyn; the City Clerk did them distinguished honor by going no more than half so rapidly as usual; Mr. Queen bussed the bride with a fervent “At last!”; and afterward there were only eighteen reporters and cameramen waiting for them in the hall. Mrs. James Guymer McKell exclaimed that she couldn’t imagine how in the world they had all known, because she and Jimmy hadn’t breathed a word to anyone but Ellery... and her groom growled an invitation to his ex-fellow-journalists to hoist a few on him, whereupon the augmented party set out for La Guardia Airport and the wedding luncheon was imbibed in a cocktail lounge, with Parlay Phil Gonachy of the Extra crying the square dance which somehow followed. At the climax of the thunderous quadrille the Airport police appeared, causing certain strict constitutionalists among the working guests to defend with camera, bottle, and bar stool the sacred freedom of the press and enabling the happy couple to slip away with their sponsor.

“Whither do you fly with your unravished bride?” inquired Mr. Queen in a slightly wobbly tone. “Or is said question none of my olfactory business?”

“It is entirely comme il faut,” replied Mr. McKell with the grandeur of one who has also given generous lip service to the sacraments of Reims and Epernay, “since we fly no-whither,” and he steered his bride gallantly exitward.

“Then why La Guardia?”

“A ruse to mislead those roistering anteaters. Equerry!”

“We’re spending our honeymoon at the Half-Moon Hotel,” confided the bride with a blush as a cab rushed up. “You’re positively the only one who knows that.”

“Mrs. McKell, I shall guard your secret with my honor.”

“Mrs. McKell,” murmured Mrs. McKell.

“All my life,” said her husband in a whisper that shot heads around twenty feet away, “I have yearned for a winter’s honeymoon among the frolicking Polar Bears of Coney Island.” And Mr. McKell yelled to the apprehensive hack, “Okay, White Fang. Mush!”

Ellery observed their exhaust fondly as they rode off into the smog.

After that he found it joy to settle down to work. Ideas for a new mystery novel flowed like the wedding party’s champagne; the only problem was to keep a sober judgment.

One morning Ellery looked around to find Father Christmas breathing down his neck. And he saw with some astonishment that New York’s Yule was to be white; overnight, 87th Street sparkled. A Samoyed rolling in the snow across the street made him think of the arctic huskies; and thus he was reminded of the James McKells and their Coney Island honeymoon, among the curious tribe of New Yorkers who called themselves the Polar Bears. Ellery grinned, wondering why he had not heard from Jimmy and Celeste. Then it occurred to him that he had, and he began looking through his deserted mail, an accumulation of several weeks.

He found Jimmy’s note in the middle of the heap.

The postmark was ten days old.

The McKells and, Christmas... This called for heroism.

A half hour later Ellery was up to his armpits in lists, and a half hour after that he was sallying forth in galoshes.

Fifth Avenue was already a speckled swamp. The plows were still working in the side streets but along the Avenue they had toiled all night like beetles rolling dung and the brown-spattered snowplows challenged the agility of jaywalkers and squeezed motor traffic into an impossible bottleneck.

A white Christmas, everybody was saying, shuffling through the slush, sneezing and coughing.

At Rockefeller Center Noel was being caroled and in the Plaza, dwarfed by a hundred-foot tree raped from some Long Island estate, the skaters were whizzing along to a determined version of “Jingle Bells.”

Santas in wrinkled red suits clanged at almost every corner, shivering. Shop windows were faery glimpses into the magic wood of advertising. And everywhere people slipped and sloshed, and Ellery slipped and sloshed with them, wearing the glazed frown by which you may know all New Yorkers, in the last week before Christmas.

He dodged in and out of great stores, trampling on little children, pushing and being pushed, clawing at merchandise, shouting his name and address, writing out checks — until, in midafternoon, his master list was reduced to a single uncrossed-off name.

But beside that name stood a large, repulsive question mark.

The McKells were the nice problem. Ellery had not sent them a wedding gift in view of the uncertainty surrounding their future habitat. At the time he had thought that by Christmas they would surely be settled, whereupon he could combine the nuptial gift with the seasonal; and here was the annual Miracle and neither the problem of the McKells’ residence nor the nature of his gifts to them had been solved. He had kept an eye alerted for inspiration all day. Silver? Glass? Silk? — no, not silk, definitely not silk. Ceramic? He saw a glossy Bubastis and shuddered. Native wood carving, something primitive? An antique? Nothing came, nothing at all.

Until, in late afternoon, Ellery found himself on 42nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Before Stern’s a Salvation Army lass, a strapping soldier of charity, sang hymns accompanied by a bluing comrade at a portable organ set down in the slush.

The organ made tinkly sounds in the treble and for a moment sounded like a musicbox.

Musicbox.

Musicbox!

They were originally a fad of French exquisites, dispensing snuff to little metallic tunes, but centuries of delight had made them currency in the realm of childhood and their pure elfishness purchased smiles from lovers.

Ellery dropped a dollar in the tambourine and considered his idea excitedly. Something special... featuring the Wedding March... yes, that was a must... inlays of precious woods, mother-of-pearl, cunning stonework... a big one, artfully made. An import, of course. The most delicate pieces came from central Europe... Swiss. A Swiss musicbox of the most elaborate craftsmanship would be expensive, but hang the expense. It would become a household treasure, a little chest of golden sentiment unawed by the McKell millions, to be kept at their bedside until they were eigh—

Swiss.

Swiss?

Switzerland!

ZÜRICH!

In a twinkling musicboxes, Wedding Marches, Christmas itself were forgotten.

Ellery waded wildly across 42nd Street and dashed through the side entrance into the New York Public Library.

For a point in his plot-in-progress had been bothering him for days. It concerned phobias. Ellery was postulating a significant relationship (of such is the kingdom of mystery writers) among morbid fear of crowds, of darkness, and of failure. Just how he had come to juxtapose these three phobias plotwise he did not know; it was his impression that he had read about their interrelationship, or heard about it, somewhere. But research had failed to turn up the source. It was holding him up.

And now Zürich. Zürich on the Limmat, Athens of Switzerland.

Zürich rang that bell!

For now Ellery remembered having either read or been told that in Zurich, at some recent international meeting of psychoanalysis, precisely such a phobic relationship had been the subject of a paper.

Search in the foreign periodical section of the Library rewarded him in less than an hour.

The source was a Züricher scientific journal, one of a pile Ellery was leafing through as he exercised his stiffened German. The entire issue was given over to the proceedings of the convention, which had lasted ten days, and all scientific papers read before it were reprinted in full. The paper he was interested in bore the alarming title of Ochlophobia, Nyctophobia, and Ponophobia; but when he glanced through it he found it to contain exactly what he was looking for.

He was about to go back to the beginning to start rereading carefully when an italic note at the end of the article caught his eye.

A familiar name.

— Paper read by Dr. Edward Cazalis of the United States...

Of course! It was Cazalis who had been responsible for the birth of the idea. Ellery recalled it all now. It had come up during that September night in the Richardson apartment, in the first hours of the on-scene investigation of Lenore’s murder. There had been a lull and Ellery found himself in conversation with the psychiatrist. They had talked about Ellery’s fiction and Dr. Cazalis had remarked with a smile that the field of phobias offered Ellery’s craft rich stores of material. On being pressed, Cazalis had mentioned work he himself had done on “ochlophobia and nyctophobia” in relation to the development of “ponophobia”; in fact, Ellery remembered his saying, he had read a paper on the subject at a convention in Zurich. And Cazalis had talked for a little about his findings, until they were interrupted by the Inspector and recalled to the sorry business of the night.

Ellery made a face. The brief conversation had sunk into his unconscious under the weight of events, to emerge two months later under pressure, its source forgotten. Sic semper the “original” idea.

It was an irony of coincidence that Cazalis should prove responsible for it.

Smiling, Ellery glanced at the footnote again.

Still smiling, Ellery flipped the journal to the front cover and glanced at the year of issue.

Now he did not smile. Now he sat staring at the last digit of the date as it grew rapidly larger, or as he himself rapidly shrank.

“Drink Me.”

He felt — if it could be called feeling — like Alice.

The Zürcher rabbit-hole.

And the Looking-Glass.

How did you get out?

At last Ellery got up from the table and made his way to the information desk outside the main reading rooms.

He crouched over copies of Who’s Who and the latest annual roster of the American Psychiatric Association.

Who’s Who... Cazalis, Edward.

The national roster of the American Psychiatric Association... Cazalis, Edward.

In each case a single Cazalis, Edward.

In each case the same Cazalis, Edward.

It was really not to be borne.

Ellery returned to his Zürich journal.

He turned the pages slowly.

Calmly.

Anyone watching me is saying: There’s a man who’s sure of himself. He turns pages calmly. Knows just what’s what.”

There it was.

Of course he’d be listed.

And that old man? Had he been present?

Ellery turned the page.

Someone tapped Ellery on the shoulder.

“Closing time, sir.”

The room was empty.

Why hadn’t they caught it?

He trudged into the hall. A guard directed him to the staircase when he made the wrong turn.

The District Attorney knows his business. His office is topnotch. They’re old hands.

He supposed they had backtracked from Katz, Donald, to Petrucchi, Stella, past Richardson, Lenore, to Willikins, Beatrice, the way growing fainter as they retreated in time until, at the five-months-ago mark, it had disappeared to become impassable. But that wouldn’t have stopped them. They probably had one or two or even three others they hadn’t been able to fix. It would actually not seem necessary to fix each one. Not in so many murders. Not over such a long period in such a peculiar case where the identity of the victim was a detail hardly meriting notice. Six, say, would do the District Attorney nicely. Plus the caught-in-the-act attempt on Celeste-Phillips-thinking-she-was-Marilyn-Soames and the minute-to-minute evidence of his Soames stalk in the days preceding the attempt.

Ellery walked uncertainly up Fifth Avenue. The weather had turned very cold and the slush had frozen in serrated little icehills of dirty gray, rutted and pocked, a relief map of nowhere on which he teetered along.

This will have to be done from home... I’ve got to have a place where I can sit and feel safe.

When the ax falls.

Executions brought to your door.

At no extra charge.

He stopped at a shop window through which a faceless angel with a needlethin torch was trying to fly, and he looked at his watch.

In Vienna it’s the middle of the night.

Then I can’t go home.

Not yet.

Not till it’s time.

He drew back from the thought of facing his father like a turtle rapped on the nose.

Ellery let himself in at a quarter of 4 in the morning.

On the tips of his toes.

The apartment was dark except for a night light in the majolica lamp on the living room table.

He felt refrigerated. The mercury had dropped to five above in the streets and the apartment was only a little less icy.

His father was snoring. Ellery went to the bedroom door and shut it, thievishly.

Then he stole into his study and turned the key. He did not remove his overcoat. Switching on the desk light, he sat down and drew the telephone to him.

He dialed the operator and asked for the Overseas Operator.

There were difficulties.

It was almost 6 o’clock. The steam had just begun to rattle the radiators and he kept his eye apprehensively on the door.

The Inspector was a 6 o’clock riser.

Finally, he got through.

Ellery prayed that his father oversleep as he waited for the Vienna operator to settle matters at her end.

“Here is your party, sir.”

“Professor Seligmann?”

“Ja?”

It was an old, old voice. Its bass cracked and a little peevish.

“My name is Ellery Queen,” said Ellery in German. “You do not know me, Herr Professor—”

“Incorrect,” said the aged voice in English, Oxonian English with a Viennese accent. “You are an author of romans policiers, and out of guilt feelings for the many crimes you commit on paper you also pursue malefactors in life. You may speak English, Mr. Queen. What do you want?”

“I hope I haven’t caught you at an inopportune moment—”

“At my age, Mr. Queen, all moments are inopportune except those devoted to speculations about the nature of God. Yes?”

“Professor Seligmann, I believe you are acquainted with the American psychiatrist, Edward Cazalis.”

“Cazalis? He was my pupil. Yes?” There was nothing in the voice, nothing at all.

Is it possible he doesn’t know?

“Have you seen Dr. Cazalis in recent years?”

“I saw him in Zürich earlier this year. Why do you ask?”

“On which occasion, Herr Professor?”

“At an international convention of psychoanalysis. But you do not tell me why, mein Herr.”

“You don’t know the trouble Dr. Cazalis is in?”

“Trouble? No. What is this trouble?”

“I can’t explain now, Professor Seligmann. But it’s of the greatest importance that you give me exact information.”

The line wheezed and keened and for a moment Ellery thought: Let us pray.

But it was only the mysterious defects of the transoceanic process coming up through Professor Seligmann’s silence.

He heard the old voice again.

Growling this time.

“Are you Cazalis’s friend?”

Am I?

“Yes, I’m Cazalis’s friend,” said Ellery.

“You hesitate. I do not like this.”

“I hesitated, Professor Seligmann,” said Ellery carefully, “because friendship is a word I weigh.”

He thought he had lost, but there was a faint chuckle in his ear and the old man said: “I attended the last few days of the Zürich meeting. Cazalis was present, I heard him read his paper on the night of the last session and I kept him up until long past dawn afterward in my hotel room telling him how absurd I thought it was. Are you answered, Mr. Queen?”

“You have an excellent memory, Herr Professor.”

“You question it.”

“Forgive me.”

“I am reversing the usual process of senescence. My memory is apparently the last to go.” The old voice sharpened. “You may rely on the accuracy of the information.”

“Professor Seligmann—”

There was a word, but it was swallowed up by such a howl of atmospheric expletive that Ellery snatched the receiver from his ear.

“Herr Professor Seligmann?”

“Yes. Yes. Are you—?” But then he faded, bolting into space.

Ellery cursed. Suddenly the line was clear.

“Herr Queen! Yes?”

“I must see you, Professor Seligmann.”

“About Cazalis?”

“About Cazalis. If I fly to Vienna at once, will you see me?”

“You would be coming to Europe for this alone?”

“Yes.”

“Come.”

“Danke schön. Auf Wiedersehen.”

But the old man had already broken the connection.

Ellery hung up.

He’s so damned old. I hope he lasts.

His European flight was a bother from beginning to end. There was trouble about his visa, long talks with the State Department, much questioning and headshaking and form-filling. And passage seemed an impossibility; everyone was flying to Europe, and everyone who flew was a person of terrestrial importance. Ellery began to realize what a very small tuber he was in the vast potato patch of world affairs.

He spent Christmas in New York after all.

The Inspector was magnificent. Not once in those days of pacing did he question the purpose of Ellery’s trip. They merely discussed ways and means and the impediments.

But the Inspector’s mustache grew noticeably ragged.

On Christmas Day Ellery cabled Professor Seligmann that he was being delayed by transportation and other nuisances but that he expected clearance at any hour.

The hour arrived late on December 28, in time to save the crumbs of Ellery’s sanity.

Exactly how his father managed it Ellery never learned, but at dawn on December 29 he found himself on a conspicuously special plane in the company of persons of obvious distinction, all of whom were unmistakably bound on missions of global gravity. He had no idea where the plane was going or when it was scheduled to arrive. He heard murmurs of “London,” “Paris,” and such, but he could detect no Strauss waltzes, and to judge from the pursed blankness that met his worried inquiries the Wiener Wald was something in Moscow.

Neither his nails nor his stomach survived the Atlantic crossing.

When they did touch soil, it was fog-choked and British. Here a mysterious delay occurred. Three and a half hours later they took off again and Ellery sank into a doze. When he awoke it was to no thunder of motors. He sat in a great hush. As far as he could make out through his window, they had landed on an Arctic ice field; his very corpuscles were frozen. He nudged his companion, a U.S. Army officer. “Tell me, Colonel. Is our destination Fridtjof Nansen Land?”

“This is France. Where you going?”

“Vienna.”

The colonel pushed out his lips and shook his head.

Ellery doggedly began to work his glaciated toes. Just as the first motor exploded, the co-pilot tapped his shoulder.

“Sorry, sir. Your space is required.”

“What!”

“Orders, sir. Three diplomats.”

“They must be very thin,” said Ellery bitterly, getting up. “What happens to the bum?”

“You’ll be put up at the field, sir, till they can find space for you on another ship.”

“Can’t I stand? I promise not to sit on anybody’s lap and I’ll gladly drop off over the Ringstrasse by parachute.”

“Your bag’s already off, sir. If you don’t mind...”

Ellery spent thirty-one hours in a whistling billet, surrounded by the invisible Republic of France.

When he did reach Vienna, it was by way of Rome. It seemed impossible, but here he was on a frozen railway station with his bag and a little Italian priest who had unaccountably clung to him all the way from Rome and a sign somewhere that said Westbahnhof, which was certainly in Vienna, so he was in Vienna.

On New Year’s Day.

Where was Professor Seligmann?

Ellery began to worry about the Viennese fuel situation. He had a frostbitten recollection of engine trouble, a forced landing after tumbling over and over among the stars like a passenger on a space ship out of control, and a miserable railway train; but his chief memory was of the cold. As far as Ellery could make out, Europe was in the Second Ice Age; and he fully expected to locate Professor Seligmann imbedded in the heart of a glacier, like a Siberian mastodon, in a perfect state of preservation. He had telephoned Seligmann from Rome, giving the old man such information as he had had about his Italian plane’s scheduled arrival. But he had not foreseen the journey through outer space and the groaning aftermath of the miserable train. Seligmann was probably getting pneumonia at... which airfield had that been?

The hell with it.

Two figures approached, crunching the icy platform. But one was a saber-toothed porter and the other a Schwester of some Austrian Roman Catholic order and neither satisfied Ellery’s conception of a world-famous psychoanalyst.

The Schwester hurried the little Italian priest away and the saber-toothed porter came dashing up, full of colloquialisms and bad breath. Ellery found himself engaged in a battle of unconquerable tongues. Finally he left his bag in the fellow’s charge, although not with confidence; the porter looked exactly like Heinrich Himmler. And he went sleuthing for a telephone. An excited female voice answered. “Herr Kavine? But is not Herr Professor with you? Ach, he will die in the cold! He must meet you. You are to wait, Herr Kavine, to wait where you are. Westbahnhof? Herr Professor will find you. He said it!”

“Bitte schön,” muttered Herr Kavine, feeling like Landru; and he returned to the platform and the glacial epoch. And waited again, stamping, blowing on his fingers, and catching only every fifth word of the porter’s. Probably the coldest winter Austria’s had in seventy-nine years, he thought. It always is. Where was the Föhn, that lecherous Lurleian breeze from the Austrian Alps which reputedly caressed the jeweled hair of Danube’s Queen? Gone, gone with all the winds of myth and fantasy. Gone with Wiener Blut, leichtes Blut, now a sullen mass of crimson icicles; gone with the Frühlingsstimmen, the spring voices, stilled by the throttling winter and the shrilling of boys crying the postwar Morgenblätter, such as they were; gone with the Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald, now tales imprisoned in an antique musicbox which was forever broken... Ellery shivered, stamped, and blew as the disguised Himmler whined to him about die guten, alten Zeiten.

In the gas chambers, Ellery thought unreasonably. Tell it to Hitler, he thought.

An der schönen, blauen Donau...

Ellery kept his refrigerated feet pumping and blew pfuis on the whole postwar European world.

Professor Seligmann came along at a little after 10 o’clock. The mere sight of that huge body, made huger by the black sheeplined greatcoat collared with Persian lamb and topped with a Russian-style bashlyk, was thawing; and when he took one of Ellery’s disembodied members in his great, dry, warm hands Ellery melted to the inner man. It was like wandering lost over the earth and coming unexpectedly upon the grandfather of your tribe. The place did not matter; where the patriarch was, there was home. Ellery was struck by Seligmann’s eyes particularly. In the lava of that massive face they were eternal fumaroles.

He barely noticed the changes in the Karlsplatz and on the Mariahilferstrasse as they rode in the psychoanalyst’s ancient Fiat, driven by a scholarly looking chauffeur, into the Inner City through toppling streets toward the Universität district where the old man lived. He was too agreeably occupied in warming himself at his host.

“You find Vienna not as you expected?” asked Professor Seligmann suddenly.

Ellery started; he had been trying to ignore the shattered city. “It’s been so many years since I was here last, Herr Professor. Since long before the War—”

“And the Peace,” said the old man with a smile. “We must not overlook the Peace, Mr. Queen. Those difficult Russians, nyet? Not to mention those difficult English, those difficult French, and — bitte schön — those difficult Americans. Still, with our traditional Schlamperei, we manage to drag along. After the first War there was a song popular in Vienna which went, ‘Es war einmal ein Walzer; es war einmal ein Wien.’ And we survived. Now we are singing it again, when we do not sing ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.’ Everywhere in Vienna people are speaking of die guten, alten Zeiten. How do you say this? ‘The good old days.’ We Viennese swim in nostalgia, which has a high saline content; that is how we remain afloat. Tell me about New York, Herr Queen. I have not visited your great city since 1927.”

Ellery, who had flown an ocean and crisscrossed half a continent to talk about something else, found himself giving a Times Square sightseeing busman’s description of postwar Manhattan. And as he talked his sense of time, numbed by his hyperborean flight, began to revive and tick away; and he experienced the shock of recognition, as if this — now — were something very old insisting in a flash on being re-experienced. Tomorrow the trial of Edward Cazalis began and here he was, gossiping with a very old man over four thousand miles away by any route. A pulse began to clamor, and Ellery fell silent as the car drew up before a shellpocked apartment building on some broad Strasse whose name he had not even bothered to watch for.

Frau Bauer, Professor Seligmann’s housekeeper, greeted her aged employer with aspirin, tea, a hot-water bag, and imprecation — and Ellery with a reminiscent frigidity; but the old man brushed her aside with a smiling “Ruhe!” and led Ellery by the hand, like a child, into the land of Gemütlichkeit.

Here, in Seligmann’s study, were the best of the grace and charming intelligence of Alt Wien. The decor was twinkly with wit; it had animation, a leisurely joyousness, and it was a little sly in a friendly way. Here the self-conscious new did not intrude; there was nothing of Prussian precision; things had a patina, they were fine and they glowed.

Like the fire. Oh, the fire. Ellery sat in the lap of a motherly chair and he felt life. And when Frau Bauer served a starving man’s breakfast, complete to melting, wonderful Kaffee-kuchen and pots of rich and aromatic coffee, he knew he was dreaming.

“The best coffee in the world,” Ellery said to his host, raising his second cup. “One of the few national advertising claims with the merit of exact truth.”

“The coffee, like almost everything else Elsa has served you, comes to me from friends in the United States.” At Ellery’s blush Seligmann chuckled. “Forgive me, Herr Queen, I am an old Schuft, as we say, a scoundrel. You have not crossed an ocean to indulge in my bad manners.” He said evenly, “What is this now about my Edward Cazalis?”

So here it was.

Ellery left the motherly chair to stand before the fire like a man.

He said: “You saw Cazalis in Zurich in June, Professor Seligmann. Have you heard from him since?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t know what’s been going on in New York this summer and fall?”

“Life. And death.”

“I beg pardon?”

The old man smiled. “I assume it, Mr. Queen. Has it not always? I do not read newspapers since the war begins. That is for people who like to suffer. I, I do not like to suffer. I have surrendered myself to eternity. For me there is today this room, tomorrow cremation, unless the authorities cannot agree to allow it, in which case they may stuff me and place me in the clock tower of the Rathaus and I shall keep reminding them of the time. Why do you ask?”

“Herr Professor, I’ve just made a discovery.”

“And what is that?”

Ellery laughed. “You know all about it.”

The old man shook silently. He didn’t when I phoned him from New York, thought Ellery, but he’s done some catching up since.

“You do, don’t you?”

“I have made some inquiries since, yes. Was it so evident? Sit down, Mr. Queen, sit down, we are not enemies. Your city has been terrorized by a paranoid murderer who strangled nine people, and now Edward Cazalis has been arrested for the crimes.”

“You don’t know the details.”

“No.”

Ellery sat down and related the story, beginning with the discovery of Archibald Dudley Abernethy’s body and ending with the capture of Cazalis in the First Avenue alley. Then he briefly indicated the subsequent conduct of the prisoner.

“Tomorrow, Professor Seligmann, Cazalis’s trial begins in New York, and I’m in Vienna—”

“To what purpose?” The old man regarded Ellery through the reek of his meerschaum. “I treated Cazalis as a patient when he came first to Vienna with his wife eighteen years ago, he studied under me subsequently, he left — I believe in 1935 — to return to America, and since that time I have seen him once. This summer. What is it you want of me, Herr Queen?”

“Help.”

“Mine? But the case is concluded. What more can there be? I do not understand. And if there is more, in which way could I be of assistance?”

“Yes.” Ellery fingered his cup. “It must be confusing. Especially since the evidence against Cazalis is so damning. He was captured in the act of attempting a tenth murder. He directed the police to the hiding place of a stock of strangling cords and they found where he said they would be, in the locked medical files in his office. And he confessed to the previous nine murders in considerable detail.” Ellery set his cup down with care. “Professor Seligmann, I know nothing of your science beyond, let’s say, some intelligent layman’s understanding of the differences among neurotic behavior, neurosis, and psychosis. But in spite of — or perhaps because of — my lack of knowledge in your field I’ve been experiencing my own brand of tension, arising from a rather curious fact.”

“And that is?”

“Cazalis never explained his... forgive me for hesitating... his motive. If he’s psychotic, his motives proceed from false views of reality which can have only clinical interest. But if he’s not... Herr Professor, before I’m satisfied, I’ve got to know what drove Cazalis to those murders.”

“And you believe I can tell you, Herr Queen?”

“Yes.”

“How so?” The old man puffed.

“You treated him. Moreover, he studied under you. To become a psychiatrist he had himself to be analyzed, a mandatory procedure—”

But Seligmann was shaking his great head. “In the case of a man so old as Cazalis was when he began to study with me, Mr. Queen, analysis is not a mandatory procedure. It is a most questionable procedure, Mr. Queen. Very few have been successfully analyzed at the age of 49, which is how old he was in 1931. Indeed, the entire project was questionable because of his age. I attempted it in Cazalis’s case only because he interested me, he had a medical background, and I wished to experiment. As it happened, we were successful. Forgive me for interrupting—”

“At any rate, you analyzed him.”

“I analyzed him, yes.”

Ellery hitched forward. “What was wrong with him?”

Seligmann murmured: “What is wrong with any of us?”

“That’s no answer.”

“It is one answer, Mr. Queen. We all exhibit neurotic behavior. All, without exception.”

“Now you’re indulging your Schufterei, if that’s the word.” The old man laughed delightedly. “I ask you again, Herr Professor: What was the underlying cause of Cazalis’s emotional upset?”

Seligmann kept puffing.

“It’s the question that’s brought me here. Because I know none of the essential facts, only the inconclusive superficial ones. Cazalis came from a poverty-laden background. He was one of fourteen children. He abandoned his parents and his brothers and sisters when a wealthy man befriended and educated him. And then he abandoned his benefactor. Everything about his career seems to me to point to an abnormal ambition, a compulsive overdrive to success — including his marriage. While his professional ethics remained high, his personal history is characterized by calculation and tremendous energy. And then, suddenly, at the apex of his career, in his prime — a breakdown. Suggestive.”

The old man said nothing.

“He’d been treated for a mild case of what they called ‘shell shock’ in the first war. Was there a connection? I don’t know. Was there, Herr Professor?”

But Seligmann remained silent.

“And what follows this breakdown? He abandons his practice, one of the most lucrative in New York. He allows his wife to take him on a world cruise, apparently recovers... but in Vienna, world’s capital of psychoanalysis, another breakdown. The first collapse had been ascribed to overwork. But to what was the second collapse, after a leisurely cruise, ascribable? Suggestive! Professor Seligmann, you treated him. What caused Cazalis’s breakdowns?”

Seligmann took the pipe from his mouth. “You ask me to disclose information, Mr. Queen, of which I came into possession in my professional capacity.”

“A nice point, Herr Professor. But what are the ethics of silence when silence itself is immoral?”

The old man did not seem offended. He set the pipe down. “Herr Queen. It is evident to me that you have come not for information so much as for confirmation of conclusions which you have already reached on the basis of insufficient data. Tell me your conclusions. Perhaps we shall find a way of resolving my dilemma.”

“All right!” Ellery jumped up. But then he sat down again, forcing himself to speak calmly. “At the age of 44 Cazalis married a girl of 19 after a busy life devoid of personal relationships with women although in his work all his relationships were with women. During the first four years of their married life Mrs. Cazalis gave birth to two children. Dr. Cazalis not only cared for his wife personally during her pregnancies but performed both deliveries. Neither infant survived the delivery room. A few months after the second fatality in childbirth, Cazalis broke down — and retired from obstetrics and gynecology, never to go back to them.

“It seems to me, Professor Seligmann,” said Ellery, “that whatever was wrong with Cazalis reached its climax in that delivery room.”

“Why,” murmured the old man, “do you say this?”

“Because... Professor Seligmann, I can’t speak in terms of libido and mortido, Ego and Id. But I have some knowledge of human beings, and the sum of whatever observations I’ve been able to make of human behavior, and of my own and others’ experience of life impels me to the conclusion.

“I observe the fact: Cazalis turns his back with cold purpose on his childhood. Why? I speculate. His childhood was predominated by a mother who was always either carrying a child or having a child, by a laborer-father who was always begetting them, and by a horde of other children who were always getting in the way of his wishes. I speculate. Did Cazalis hate his mother? Did he hate his brothers and sisters? Did he feel guilt because he hated them?

“And I observe the career he sets for himself, and I say: Is there a significant connection between his hate for maternity and his specialization — as it were — in maternity? Is there a nexus between his hate for the numerous progeny of his parents and his determination to make himself an expert in the science of bringing more children into the world?

“Hate and guilt — and the defenses against them. I’ve put two and two together. Is this permitted, Herr Professor? Is this valid?”

Seligmann said, “One tends to oversimplify in your sort of mathematics, mein Herr. But go on.”

“Then I say to myself: Cazalis’s tensions lie deep. His guilts are profound. His defenses against the unconscious becoming conscious — if that’s a fundamental identification of neurotic behavior — are elaborate.

“Now I observe his marriage. Immediately, it seems to me, new tensions — or extensions of old ones — set in. Even a so-called normal man of 44 would find a first marriage, after a life of overwork and little socializing — would find such a marriage, to a 19-year-old girl, unsettling and conflicting. In this case the young bride was from a thinblooded New England strain. She was emotionally of delicate balance, rather rarefied, on the frigid side, and almost certainly inexperienced. And Cazalis was as he was. I speculate.

“I say: It seems to me Cazalis must at once have found himself involved in serious sexual dissatisfactions, frustrations, and disagreeable conflicts. I say: There must have been recurrent episodes of impotence. Or his wife was unresponsive, unawakened, or actually repelled. He began to feel an erosive inadequacy, perhaps? Yes, and a resentment. It wouldn’t be unnatural. He, the highly successful entrepreneur of the biological process, can’t master the technique of his own marriage. Also, he loves his wife. She is an intelligent woman, she has a fragile charm, reserve, breeding; even today, at 42, she’s handsome; at 19 she must have been extremely attractive. Cazalis loves her as only a man can love who is old enough to be the father of the highly desirable object of his affections. And he’s inadequate.

“So I say: A fear is born. Undoubtedly this fear arises from altogether different causes, but it expresses itself in a disguised form: he becomes afraid he will lose his young wife to another man.”

Ellery drank some coffee and Seligmann waited. The ormolu clock on the mantelpiece kept a sort of truce between them.

“The fear is nourished,” continued Ellery, “by the great difference in their ages, temperaments, backgrounds, interests. By the demands of his practice, his long hours at the hospital assisting other men’s wives to bring other men’s children into the world, by his enforced professional absences from Mrs. Cazalis — frequently at night.

“The fear spreads like cancer. It gets out of control. Cazalis becomes violently suspicious of his wife’s relationships with other men, no matter how slight, no matter how innocent — especially of her relationships with younger men.

“And soon this fear grows into an obsession.

“Professor Seligmann.” Ellery eyed the old Viennese. “Was Edward Cazalis obsessively jealous of his wife during the first four years of their marriage?”

Seligmann picked up his pipe and rather deliberately set about knocking it out. “Your method, Mr. Queen, is one unknown to science,” he said with a smile. “But this of great interest to me. Continue.” He stuck the empty pipe in his mouth.

“Then Mrs. Cazalis becomes pregnant.” Ellery frowned. “One could imagine at this point Cazalis’s fears would recede. But no, he’s passed the point of reasonableness. Her very pregnancy feeds his jealousy and becomes suspect. Isn’t this a confirmation of his suspicions? he asks himself. And he insists — he insists — on taking care of his wife himself. He is undoubtedly excessively devoted, solicitous, and watchful. Gestation unfortunately takes nine months. Nine months in which to watch a fetus grow. Nine months in which to torture himself with a question which at last bursts forth in the full deformity of obsession: Is this child mine? Is it?

“Oh, he fights it. He fights an endless battle. But the enemy is discouraging. Kill it in one place and it springs up, viciously lively as ever, in another. Does he ever tell his wife of his suspicions? Accuse her outright of infidelity? Are there scenes, tears, hysterical denials? If so, they only serve to strengthen his suspicions. If not, if he keeps his raging fears bottled up, then it’s even worse.

“Mrs. Cazalis comes to term, goes through labor.

“And there she lies.

“In the delivery room.

“Under his hands.

“And the baby dies.

“Professor Seligmann, do you see how far I’ve traveled?”

The old man merely waggled the pipe in his jaws.

“Mrs. Cazalis becomes pregnant a second time. The process of suspicion, jealousy, self-torment, and uncertainty-certainty repeats itself. Again Cazalis insists on seeing his wife through her pregnancy. Again he insists on performing the delivery.

“And again his baby dies in the delivery room.

“His second child, dead like the first.

“Under his hands.

“Under those powerful, delicately nerved, practiced surgeon’s hands.

“Professor Seligmann.” Ellery loomed over the old man. “You’re the only being on the face of the earth in a position to tell me the truth. Isn’t it fact that when Edward Cazalis came to you eighteen years ago for psychiatric treatment he had broken down under a dreadful load of guilt — the guilt of having murdered his own two children in the act of delivery?”

After a moment old Seligmann took the empty pipe from his lip. He said carefully, “For a physician to murder his own unborn children under the delusion that they were another’s — this would be psychosis, Herr Queen, no? You could not expect him to follow his subsequent brilliant, stable career, most particularly in the field of psychiatry. And my position, what would that have been? Still, you believe this, Herr Queen?”

Ellery laughed angrily. “Would it make my meaning clear if I amended my question to conclude: ‘the guilt of fearing he had murdered his own two children’?”

The old man looked pleased.

“Because it was the logical development of his neurosis, wasn’t it? He had excessive feelings of guilt about his hates and a great need for punishment. He, the eminent obstetrician, had brought thousands of other men’s children into the world alive, but under his hands his own children had died. Did I kill them? he agonized. Did my obsessive jealousy and suspicions make my hands fail? Did I want them to be born dead and my hands saw to it that they were? I did want them to be born dead. And they were born dead. Therefore I killed them. The terrible illogic of neurosis.

“His common sense told him they had been breech births; his neurosis told him he had performed countless other breeches successfully. His common sense told him that his wife, let’s say, was not ideally constructed for motherhood; his neurosis told him her babies were fathered by other men. His common sense told him he had done his efficient best; his neurosis told him that he had not, that he might have done this or that, or not done that or this, or that had he not insisted on performing the deliveries himself but placed his wife in the hands of another obstetrician, his children would have survived. And so on.

“Because he had an overwhelming compulsion to believe it, within a short time Cazalis had convinced himself that he’d murdered both babies. A little of this mental Schrecklichkeit and he broke. When his wife took him traveling and he came to Vienna — odd coincidence, wouldn’t you say, Professor? — lo, he collapsed again. And went to you. And you, Professor Seligmann, you probed and analyzed and treated and... you cured him?”

When the old psychoanalyst spoke, his rumbling voice held a growl. “It is too many years and I know nothing of his emotional problems since. Even at the time there was a menopausal complication. If in the past few years he has been pushing himself too hard — at the present stage of his life... Often in the middle age people are unable to defend themselves by means of neurotic symptoms and they break down completely into a psychosis. We find, for example, that paranoid schizophrenia is frequently a disease of late middle age. Still, I am surprised and troubled. I do not know. I should have to see him.”

“He still has guilt feelings. He must have. It’s the only explanation for what he’s done, Professor.”

“What he has done? You mean, Mr. Queen, murdering nine persons?”

“No.”

“He has done something else?”

“Yes.”

“In addition to the nine murders?”

“To the exclusion,” said Ellery, “of the nine murders.”

Seligmann rapped the bowl of his meerschaum on the arm of the chair.

“Come, mein Herr. You speak in riddles. Precisely what is it that you do mean?”

“I mean,” said Ellery, “that Cazalis is innocent of the charge for which he is going to trial in New York tomorrow morning.”

“Innocent?”

“I mean, Professor Seligmann, that Cazalis did not kill those nine people. Cazalis is not — and never was — the Cat.”