Manhunt. Volume 5, Number 1, January, 1957

His Own Jailor by Bryce Walton

He carried a case containing a fortune in gems and he’d never been robbed. Then Morten found the Jewel of Nakedness...

This time, she got Morten so fearfully worked up that he ran into the bathroom and slammed the door.

“Hurry up, Morty,” she said. “You’ll have to be leaving soon.”

He looked at his flat characterless face in the mirror on which toothbrush splatters had accumulated. The specks gave his face an oddly diseased look. He wiped the perspiration from his forehead. He felt some of the pain, from having clamped his teeth too hard, leaving his jaws. His normal composure, his calmness, the expressionless surface returned. He was himself.

Rose, he knew, was still lying out there on the bed. She was wearing that blue transparent negligee and nothing else. She was carelessly and incredibly exposing the living jewel of her nakedness. Morton thought of her in this way, because he was always thinking in terms of his trade.

When he arrived at her apartment that evening, she had been wearing nothing but a pair of spike-heeled black pumps, and a wispy black lace gown. He had stood looking, listening to the secret sounds of her body moving under the silk. The fever started then, as it started every evening the same way, but this time it had reached a frightening pitch. That choking elation of feeling was getting beyond control. Such a possibility scared Morten until he felt sick. What if he got too impatient, made her mad at him, made her call off the whole thing? The thought made the bathroom floor go soft under him. Something happened momentarily to the familiar angular pattern of the walls.

Morten hurried out of the bathroom, hesitated in the hall before moving toward the bizarre room where she waited. African masks were in it, weird mobiles, striped walls, a big, burlap-covered Hollywood bed under a wine-colored lamp, shaped like a bottle and suspended from the ceiling.

He had paid the rent for this place a month ago, when he and Rose had started their relationship. He had paid for all this peculiar furnishing. He sympathized with her uncommon taste, but he still did not feel exactly at home here. “This is for you, honey,” Rose had said, “whether you look the part or not. You’ve got an avant-gard soul. One thing we’re not, honey. We’re not common.”

“No,” Morty had agreed. “We’re not common.”

She hated the common things worse than he did. She would tell him about her childhood on the farm, her stint as a car-hop and in a pencil tablet factory. Sometimes she stood naked by the window and made nasty remarks about the common jerks down below.

Joe Pollak had introduced her to Morten. Joe had brought her as a date to the meeting of the Southern California Guild, American Gem Society, at the Biltmore. But Morten had taken her home. Morten still couldn’t quite believe that Rose preferred him to the handsome Joe Pollak, even though Joe was wild, dissipated and chronically unemployed these days.

Later Joe told Morten. “She’s a mad chick. You see her kind hanging around jewelry exhibits all the time, picking up with salesmen, and loitering around jewelry auctions. They’ve got a bug about stones. And let me tell you something — with them it’s like getting loved up good. They’re crazy. They can hypnotize themselves, drive themselves nuts, looking into a ruby. It’s like dope. But she’s an interesting chick to play around with. And she goes for you. Those crazy gone stories of yours, man.”

He could understand her, he thought, because ordinary little man in a gray suit that he was on the outside, inside he knew what it meant to look into the blazing heart of a precious stone.

He stepped carefully toward the bed. She frowned up at him. She put the wine bottle on the floor, started playing with that lump of uncut diamond he had carried with him for good luck for at least fifteen years.

“Sit down, honey,” she said, and patted the bed. He sat rigidly on the edge, gripping his wet hands together.

“You want to kiss me again, honey?” she asked. Only she was looking at the uncut diamond. Her eyes were getting that glazed, distant look.

“Yes, may I?” he said, leaning over her.

“First, tell me another story.”

His mouth felt dry. She shifted her long warm thigh against him. His eyes blurred. She was working on him again, working him up to such a pitch that he had trouble speaking, afraid that when he spoke his voice would quiver, or explode in a shout.

“Well,” he began carefully. She was playing suggestively with his hand, caressing each finger.

“You can hold my hand if you want,” she said.

He thanked her with his eyes as he began to tell her a story. “Well, there was this Mogul Emperor Jehangir. He had his name carved on a noble ruby. He was secure in his belief that he would thereby be remembered to posterity. He believed he would be remembered for a longer time than if he had monuments built of stone, or if historians wrote about him. And one day...”

It wasn’t a long story. But he made it longer because he was sitting beside her and holding her hand. And the longer he told the story, the more her lips parted, the more her eyes got that dark dreamy look, and she began to work her hand in his in a suggestive way that kept him talking on and on in a kind of stupefied ecstasy, improvising as he went along, bringing in the exotic names of jewels and emperors and queens from other stories he hadn’t told her yet.

That first night when she brought him to her apartment after Joe introduced them, they sat close together on the bed, and held hands, and he had told her one of his stories.

He told her, that first night, about the famous Kaianian crown, shaped like a fez, and topped by an uncut ruby that came from Siam and was as large as a hen’s egg. And he also told her about the fabulous Kaianian belt, a foot wide, weighing eighteen pounds, and one complete mass of diamonds, emeralds, pearls and rubies.

She allowed him to kiss her then. The effect of that kiss was like a deep shock. Nothing like it had ever happened to Morten before. His life had altered at once.

All those years before Rose came along, Morten had sat alone in hotel rooms looking at his jewels, and dreaming up stories, and reading books about the fabulous histories of precious stones. He had been a bachelor all his life, and the only women he had known were those anonymous ones you are introduced to by bell-hops and taxi drivers.

But sooner or later he always, as now, ran out of words.

For ten minutes after he stopped talking this time, Rose lay with her eyes closed, her lips parted, the uncut diamond with its odd slivery edge harder than a knife blade shining in the wine-colored light as it glittered in her cupped hand.

“You can kiss me now, honey,” she whispered. He leaned over and kissed her, then jerked away, stood up quickly on weak legs. His heart was hammering too hard. He tried to walk away from her but sank down instead on his knees and pressed his face against her breasts. “I want to stay,” he said thickly. “Please, let me stay tonight. Please...”

His lips felt dry. He realized that he had crossed that agonizing line of terror and timidity, broken through it like someone plunging through a pane of colored glass. She was pushing him away, not unkindly, not irritated, very differently from that other time when he tried to embrace her. She patted his head this time.

He breathed more easily. He had to control himself. He had to be patient. No genuine gem was ever really possessed.

“Next time, honey, you can stay. But now you’d better go.”

He stumbled to the closet, slid out his telescope jewelry sample case, and felt the familiar mold of the worn handle settle in his hand as he lifted it.

She still had that sleepy loved look. Her lips had a wet shine across the shadowed room. “Let me keep this again this trip, honey.”

He nodded and she gripped the uncut stone in her hands. The trip before last, she had kept the Oriental ruby from his sample case to play with. He had explained to her carefully that it was not just any sort of ruby that you might pick up east of Suez, but a particular kind found in Upper Burma. And the Burmese ruby ranks next in scale of hardness to the sapphire. “Oh honey,” she had breathed, “tell me more about it.”

He walked out of the apartment now and shut the door. He leaned against the wall a moment before walking out into the wet night.

When he got to Barstow, his first stop this trip, there would be a telegram waiting for him from Rose. There always was. A telegram telling him not to be lonely, that she was waiting.

That was nice. Nobody had ever been waiting anywhere for Morten before, that he remembered.

He walked down Hollywood Boulevard toward the bus terminal, carrying his sample case containing 70,000 dollars worth of white Pentelle stone rings — Jonker, Vargas and Liberator cut diamonds. Also, since buyers were preparing for June bride sales, and the accent was on wedding rings, Morten was carrying, in addition to his regular elite line, a lot of customized sets — virgin diamonds, Cellincraft, Lord Jason, and Miss Vanity items.

He was thinking of Rose as he walked to the bus terminal, bought his ticket to Barstow, went to a booth in the coffee shop, ordered coffee, and sat there waiting two hours for his bus. He never once thought of the possibility of being robbed. His company was protected by the Jewelers’ Security Alliance and Harold Morten was considered a good risk. He had never once been robbed. No one had ever even attempted to rob him. It had been years since Morten had even thought of such a thing.

Joe Pollak, on the other hand, had been held up and robbed so many times, Nathenson and Co., of New Jersey, had been forced to fire him, and Joe had never sold jewels since. After the famous Berland robbery, the Security Alliance sent out a mailing piece, urging every traveling salesman to exercise extreme care in order to avoid similar holdups.

A salesman was never to ride alone in an automobile when carrying valuable merchandise. He was never to leave an automobile unattended when it contained goods or samples. If possible, salesmen should ship their merchandise by registered mail to their destination — preferably to a jeweler who was known to them. If this was not possible, the merchandise should be shipped to a hotel, and—

But Morten had thrown the mailing piece away. He didn’t even own a car. He never traveled the same route twice in the same way. He sometimes traveled by bus, sometimes by train, at other times he took a plane. There was no schedule, no routine to his trips. He never checked into the same hotels, except in case of an emergency. He had unique characteristics as a salesman. He entered every retail shop by the back door, did his selling in the rear of the store, left by the back door. He never stayed at the ritzy hotels, but at motels, rooming houses, or at cheap hotels.

Joe Pollak, at a bull session following a convention in San Francisco, once told Morten that the real reason Morten was never robbed was because he didn’t exist. “As a human being, Morty,” Joe had said, “you don’t exist.” Everybody laughed.

“Why not?” Morten asked, his moon-face expressionless.

“Because you’re a statistic, the average man. What do you weigh, Morty? How tall are you? What color are your eyes? Your hair? What kind of clothes do you wear? Think about it, man! The average doesn’t exist except in statistics. Man, you’re anonymous. No heist artist will ever spot you, and even if he did, he couldn’t remember what you looked like the next time he saw you.”

It was an unpleasant fact, but Morten knew that it was true. Sometimes a retail jeweler to whom Morten had sold many times, momentarily forgot he had ever seen him before. And hotel clerks were frequently embarrassed over not remembering him.

Joe had said, “You walk along, man, getting on and off busses, on and off trains, handling maybe fifty grand in ice like it was Fuller brushes, or cakes of sample soap.”

Maybe luck also entered into his not having been robbed, Morten sometimes thought. The fact was that he didn’t even belong among the odd group of transients who sold jewelry. He was a jewelry salesman because of the way he felt about precious stones, because of what the stones did to fill up the big empty holes of loneliness and fear in cheap hotels, in towns that never had a name.

Robbery of precious stones had no meaning either. He was convinced that you could not really buy or sell them, that no one ever really owned, for example, such a thing as an Egyptian emerald.

In Barstow, after the bus crossed the dry river bed where willows drooped over hot white sand, he checked into a cheap hotel. He left the sample jewel case in his room, went to Western Union Office, but this time there was no telegram from Rose. Maybe it would be along later, he thought.

He returned to his hotel, drank his regular shot of bourbon, showered, shaved, washed out his orlan shirt and hung it up to dry on a clotheshanger by the open window. He sat down and looked at some of the glittering samples for an hour, dreaming of the Nile, of the treasure vault of the Shah of Iran where, spread upon Oriental rugs of great price, lie jewels beyond price. The famous crown and near it the two lambskin caps in the traditional flower pot shape, adorned with magnificent aigrettes of diamonds, and about them, trays of pearl, ruby, and emerald necklaces, and hundreds of sparkling rings, a jewel-encrusted sword scabbard, and the finest turquoise in the world, three or four inches long, and without a flaw, and an emerald big as a walnut, covered with the names of the monarchs who had possessed it.

Then when the shirt was dry, he put it on again, and went out for a light dinner of salad and toast, then took a leisurely stroll in the cooling evening breeze. He sat on a park bench, thinking about Rose. Later he would walk back to Western Union. It frightened him to remember the years when there could have been no telegram, when there had been no one, no one at all.

When he got back to Hollywood this time, he would stay with her. She had promised. He would move in and stay with Rose.

As he sat there secretly flushed with anticipation, he heard a slight crunch of gravel behind him in the darkness, and a bursting of breath just to his left. For the first time since he was twelve years old he knew immediately, somehow intuitively, that something horrible was about to happen. His neck tingled. Something in his stomach seemed to turn completely over as he started to shift his head around.

An arm pulled in hard against his windpipe. He dug his fingers into powerful, rigid muscle that was slippery with sweat. He tried to yell, but the sound bubbled and choked off in his throat.

He felt the bench turn, topple under him as he was dragged bodily backward over the slatted wood. And far away, as though his legs were fifty feet long, he could feel and hear his heels sliding through gravel, then down through warm sand. Leaves whipped over his face.

When he opened his eyes, he found that he was lying on damp earth in the dark. He heard insects, but nothing else, except once a dog barking, but that sounded a long way off.

His body throbbed when he moved a little. After that he lay there for what seemed hours. He was afraid to move.

When gray light slid through the cracks of dry wood and a dirty burlap curtain over a window, he still lay there looking dazedly at the unpainted boards, the shingled roof with holes in it, and a rusty, potbellied stove. A cabinet made of three orange crates had several cans of beans in it.

He got up stiffly. He was so freightened he could scarcely stand, but he forced himself to try the door. It was locked, but so flimsy he could have pushed it open.

“Don’t make any noise,” he heard a voice outside say. Through the cracks he saw a vague form move a little. Twigs crackled. “Don’t make a noise in there, Morten. Don’t try to make a break either. If you do, I’m coming in there and kill you.”

Morten sat quickly down, slid backward until he was pressed tight up against the wall.

“One little peep out of you, Morten, you’re dead, and I mean it.”

The voice seemed muffled, disguised, Morten thought dully. And then he stopped thinking. He had to stop thinking, stop feeling. His thoughts could go only one way, and he couldn’t stand to go that way.

Hours later, Morten felt paralyzed from sitting rigidly in one place. He moved slowly so as not to make any noise. Then after trying several times he finally managed to whisper. “I’m hungry.”

“Eat beans,” the voice said.

A can opener was beside the cans and Morten opened a can and ate the warm tasteless beans. He drank from a can of water. There were drowned mosquitoes in the water, but after awhile that didn’t bother him.

That night he heard mice squealing near him, felt fear, disgust. He thought of Rose. Something broke inside of him then and he crawled through the darkness to the door and struck it with his small fists.

The door swung open. He felt incredible shock as a fist caught him under the chin. He tried to scream and gagged on his own blood. The blows continued, but after awhile he didn’t feel them. All he felt was sickening fear and after that he lay frozen in the darkness.

“The next time, I’ll brain you,” the voice warned him.

Two days later, in the late afternoon, he lost control of himself. He ran into the door. It was the only time in his life, since vaguely, remembered temper tantrums in front of his mother when he was a kid, that he had ever really completely lost control. He had screamed out several times before he realized the screams were his. And then he ran into the door, beating it with his fists, kicking and screaming. The door opened.

He stood looking, waiting. He knew for the first time in his life that there was something worse than the freezing fear of pain. He felt as though some abscess had broken after years of infectious swelling.

He waited, whimpering a little, expecting the brutal lunge, the shocking horror of kicking feet and drubbing fists. But nothing moved anywhere in the darkness. The only sounds were mosquitoes humming. Once from way down the river through the willows he heard the musical murmuring of Mexican voices, and a guitar strumming. It all faded out. There was nothing else anywhere, but Morten standing, waiting, sobbing.

No one was there. No one guarding the shack. There had been someone here guarding it two days ago. No one now. He leaned against the side of the shack and closed his eyes. Something burned in his throat. He started to cry, openly, like a woman. He was sure that whoever had been here had left at the end of the first day. Only his own sick fear had held him in the shack. His own jailor. That, he thought, is the story of my life.

He recalled a story he had once read about some fish in a pool. The fish had been kept in one section of the pool by a shadow cast down from above. The fish thought the shadow was real, something solid. And they lived and died, afraid to swim through nothing but a shadow.

It was over five miles back into Barstow. None of the trucks rolling in there for a night’s layover stopped to pick Morten up. He walked with a raw feeling underneath, like glass about to crack. He felt like a bottle with pressure building up inside. He felt all the things he had never allowed himself to feel before. He felt a strange, burning joy, a wild anticipation.

As usual, the clerk at his hotel didn’t recognize Morten and he had a disgusted look on his face as he eyed Morten’s dirty rumpled suit, his once-white shirt. By way of identifying himself, Morten told the clerk the date on which he had checked in.

“Where you been, Mr. Morten, out hunting uranium?” the clerk asked.

Morten looked at the clerk as though he had never seen him before either. “No,” he said. “I was waiting for a shadow to go away.”

The clerk shrugged.

“I had a case, a square case,” Morten said. “Is it here?”

“Oh sure, I put that down in the basement. We got a storage room down there. I figured you just went off and forgot it.”

“I want it now please,” Morten said. “And you can hurry getting it.”

The clerk shrugged again, went through a door across the lobby. Morten looked at the door as though he was looking at something else. His eyes ached. His stomach still felt nauseous, but the fear was no longer there. He went into the men’s room, threw cold water on his face. He straightened his tie, combed his hair.

When the clerk brought the case back up, Morten lifted it. It weighed the same, felt the same, but he knew it wasn’t the same. He paid the clerk, tipped him a dollar, and walked out onto the almost empty sidestreet. A Mexican sat on some steps cuddling a bottle of wine. A woman was yelling out of a window. He opened the case and took a quick look into it.

A bus would not be fast enough. A train would not be fast enough either. Maybe nothing would be fast enough. Maybe the three days he had been kept in the shack had been enough. But they knew him well, or they thought they had known him well. Well enough to know he was so afraid, so compliant, so cooperative that he could be put in a shack, threatened once, beaten up once, and left there safely without a guard long enough for them to get into his hotel room, take 70,000 dollars worth of jewelry, and replace it with pebbles. They figured they knew him well enough to be certain he would be imprisoned in that shack by the shadows of fear, long enough for them to get the stuff to a Los Angeles fence and get out of the country with the money.

Maybe they had been right. But he had an idea that they had expected him to stay in that shack even longer, and that afterward he would be so shocked and shattered by the experience he would be incapacitated for an additional period of time.

To save time, Morten rented a car in Barstow from one of those companies that have representative agencies in practically every city in the country. You may rent the car in one city, drive it, and, if you wish, turn it in another city.

He drove fast into Los Angeles. On the way, he stopped once for gas, and one other time to pour the rocks out of his sample jewel case and check the secret compartment in the side to make sure that the revolver was still there.

He had kept it because it had been a gift from a friend, and it had been in that compartment for over a year. Every jewelry salesman carried one. This one was covered with opals and garnets, and Morten had never thought of it as something that could kill anything. He stopped on the outskirts of Pasadena, at a hardware store, and bought bullets for the gun.

A little before five o’clock in the morning, Morten parked the car in front of the Pagoda Palace Apartments on North Berendo. There couldn’t be any mistake about it, of course. It had all been a plot from the start. Joe Pollak and Rose Oparin. Rose was the only one who knew he was going to Barstow. Joe was the man who had kept him in the shack. He was sure of the first, guessing at the second. Whether it was Joe or not, that wasn’t so important now anyway.

What was important was very important to Morten. He knew that every night when he left the apartment he had paid for and furnished, Joe had walked in. Morten had been afraid there, too, of taking what was his. Afraid of the shadow in the water.

He was sure that the apartment where he had first visited Rose would be vacated now. And there was only the slightest chance that they hadn’t left Joe’s apartment yet.

He touched the jeweled gun in his coat pocket. His clothes were suddenly soaked with perspiration. He got out of the car, shut the door, and walked toward the grotesque jumble of flaking plaster and ridiculous concrete Buddhas, back among the ratty palm trees.

Joe Pollak needed a special kind of place, he had once told Morten, because of his women. A private entrance on the ground floor, preferably in the rear with plenty of screening vegetation — palm trees, poinciana bushes, orange, pepper, and avocado trees. Joe liked this place; he had been living here for several years.

Morten walked between the trees, past a crumbled dragon, with half its plaster tongue missing. The door was red with the lacquer flaking away, and with a moldy brass knocker which Morten lifted and then stood holding as he listened. He thought he heard rustling movement behind the door. He made a rattling sound in his throat as if something had broken loose inside of him.

He kept on standing there like a flower growing in a pot, struggling instinctively like an animal in a net. And this blind struggle drew a shuddering breath out of him. His round moonface had no discernible expression, except for a line of white that circled the thin contours of his lips.

He banged the knocker twice. After some moments, Joe Pollak opened the door cautiously, only a crack, and Morten fired several times. He pushed the door open then and stepped over the body curled up on the floor.

In the shadows, he moved over to the bed where Rose’s gray face strained toward him, the mouth open. Closer, he could see the incredible exposed jewel of her nakedness, the jewel that had been denied him — but which was rightly his. He began to quiver as his hands went out to her white breasts, a tremor passed through his body.

He pushed her head back against the pillow and dug his hand into her neck. He could feel her body writhing under his weight, her legs kicking at him. She began to moan, but he bit into her lips and stopped the sounds. He took Rose with all the lust and hate and passion of which he had become capable.

And then he saw the uncut diamond on the table beside the bed. He reached out his hand and grasped it, felt the sharp, hard edges. He towered over Rose now, one hand holding her polished black hair, looking down at her stunned face, her swollen lips.

Someone was banging and kicking at the door.

Morten said softly, “There was the famous Mogul ruby which passed from the hands of the Emperor Jehangir into the hands of Shah Jehan. He gave it to his lovely wife, the same lady for whom as a sorrowing widower, he built the Taj Mahal. And royal gem that it was, it came at last into the hands of Queen Victoria, a few years before the great diamond Koh-i-noor...”

Morten slid the uncut diamond through the stretched tendons of her throat.

It was as though someone had drawn a red drape across his eyes.