None But Lucifer

Chapter V

The place amazed Hale. Just what he had expected was not very clear. But it would have seemed more fitting if it had been luxurious, enormous, of course, dark with furtive shadows, the air heavy with deadening incense. And there should have been only one person present — a lank, intent, mocking figure in flowing black, whose piercing eyes would probe the mind's foulest impulses, whose mouth would sneer perpetually.

Hale stepped out of the shaky elevator into the loft. It was enormous, as lofts usually are. But it was glaringly bright, deafeningly noisy, and full of hard-working men and girls. The floor was rough and unvarnished. All down the length of the huge room, office workers typed, ran calculators, and roved among hundreds of steel filing cabinets.

For the first time, Hale felt uncertain. He was sure that the wrong person had answered his advertisement. But he had addressed it, as emphatically as possible, to one individual only. Nobody else could have made enough sense out of it to answer it.

He approached the harried switchboard operator. "You answered my ad in the Globe."

"Hello," she said into the transmitter. "Alexander P. Johnson. I'm sorry, Mr. Johnson is very busy. I'll connect you with one of his assistants."

"My name is William Hale," he said more loudly.

"Hello, Finchley? Mr. Johnson is still interested in the Osterman case ... He knows he committed suicide ... He wants the inside on their financial condition and what they're going to do with the daughter ... Keep in touch there —"

Hale shoved the clipped advertisement at her, jiggling it until her eyes focused on it. "Mr. Johnson's expecting you," she rattled off finally. "Room down at the other end." She pointed at the beaverboard inclosure at the opposite end of the loft, and resumed her steady talking into the telephone and yanking and inserting plugs.

Hale snatched up his ad and strode between the rows of desks. Nobody looked at him. The place was incredibly efficient. He shook his head, puzzled. More than ever he felt he was in the wrong place. He knocked at a door lettered:

ALEXANDER P. JOHNSON

Just that, as if it should be obvious who Alexander P. Johnson was. A hearty, businesslike voice invited him to enter.

Alexander P. Johnson sat at a battered, heaped desk. Very little noise came through the insulated beaverboard walls.

Hale stared suspiciously at the mild blue eyes that Alexander P. Johnson raised. Was this his goal? This chubby Babbitt with a face like a pale-pink pumpkin, who ran an oversized clipping bureau?

"How do you do," said Johnson, professionally cordial. "You wanted to see me?" He removed his spectacles with a quick gesture.

Hale said: "I put an ad in the Globe a couple of days ago, addressed to none but Lucifer. You answered it."

"Did I?" Johnson thrust the earpieces of his glasses into his white hair and scratched the faintly visible pink scalp. "May I see the reply advertisement?"

Hale put it on the desk. Johnson put on his glasses and read aloud:

William Hale: My detective agency and clipping bureau will be of inestimable aid to you. Consult me at your leisure; no obligation. Alexander P. Johnson.

Johnson thought a moment and said: "I don't seem to remember this. What did your advertisement say?"

"To none but Lucifer: Of all the inhabitants of the Inferno, none but Lucifer and I know that Hell is Hell."

"Oh, now I understand," Johnson smiled brightly. "One of my assistants must have answered it. We often reply to classified advertisements, even the obscure ones. The cost is small, and one lucrative case pays for many wasted follow-ups."

Hale looked thoughtfully at Johnson's perfectly ordinary round face. His feelings and his logic were in conflict; but having let his logic lead him thus far, he saw no reason to change his plan now. "You're not convincing me — Lucifer!"

Johnson cocked his head. "What ... what do you mean?"

"I'll tell you exactly what I mean. My ad was addressed to nobody else. It didn't ask a question, and didn't require a reply. Nobody but Lucifer could have had the slightest interest in it. Your detective agency couldn't have thought I was searching for anyone, and your clipping bureau had no excuse to think I was saving clippings."

"Answering classified advertisements is part of my office's routine —"

Hale leaned over the desk. "You are Lucifer!"

Johnson looked frightened. "You're actually taking this nonsense seriously. Please, Mr. Hale ... if I've offended you by answering your ad, please accept my apology —"

Hale dragged over the wooden chair behind him and sat down. "You're clever, Lucifer. But I've studied your works too well to be fooled. I'm ashamed of myself for thinking you'd be tall and sinister, with a black cape, horns, hoofs, and so forth. That would be melodramatic — obvious. And you're anything but obvious."

Johnson reached toward a board of buttons. "Mr. Hale," he said frantically, "I'm sorry, but if you persist in acting insane, I'll have to ring for assistance."

Hale grabbed Johnson's fat wrist and squeezed. Johnson cried out and his pudgy white hand turned red. Hale rasped: "I'm probably taking a chance of going out in a puff of smoke, but you're not going to ring if I can help it."

"I won't ring, only just don't squeeze my hand any more. Please!"

Hale released him. He was slightly shaken by the contact of the warm, soft flesh. It could have belonged to any aging, unathletic businessman, whereas Hale felt that the wrist really ought to have been cold, clammy, and inhumanly strong.

"I'll start at the beginning," Hale said, settling back. "Several writers gave me the hint, but there was always something odd and constrained about the way they dropped their suggestions.

"Arnold Bennett was the main source. You'd expect me to find the truth in some old sorcerer's manuscript, wouldn't you? But those old boys had lost themselves in a mystic maze of absurdity — incantations, charms, and what not. I don't have to explain that to you. You're in a better position to know than anyone else."

Johnson squirmed uncomfortably. His terrified gaze commuted between Hale's fierce eyes and the bulges in his overcoat pockets.

"Bennett was writing his journal. Suddenly, without any connection at all, he put down: `Of all the inhabitants of the Inferno, none but Lucifer knows that Hell is Hell.' Just like that — no explanation — a random thought — on the surface!

"But something — you! — kept him from developing that thought and killed him, I suppose, not long after, to prevent him from thinking about it.

"The quotation doesn't explain anything, by itself, but it implies that the damned don't know they're in Hell. They think they're somewhere else. Where?

"At first I wasn't certain. Bernard Shaw gave me the proof. He said: `If the planets are inhabited, the Earth is their Hell.' You didn't kill him, but somehow he forgot to develop the idea.

"Now I had the generalizations, and I needed substantiating facts. I used myself as a guinea pig. I arranged to be sick, alone, and broke in a rooming house; but I wanted to escape and find myself homeless on the streets in the middle of winter. The superintendent and his wife almost refused to let me go. They'd have put me in a hospital, where I'd have had free food, shelter, and medical attention, if I'd let them. They'd have given me money or let me stay in their apartment.

"But anybody who's lived in a rooming house knows that janitors are completely hardboiled. They don't mind evicting a sick person — when he's scared and wants to stay. You get the opposite of what you want — or appear to want."

"So I went to the employment agencies, and sincerely tried to get a job, no matter what sort of work or how little it paid. There were jobs all right. Most of them paid just about enough to live on, but I wasn't particular. Only they wanted deposits, and I didn't have any money. I did wangle an eight-dollar-a-week job out of an agent without a deposit. But I wanted that job too much. I got it under conditions that made it impossible to hold it, and pretty soon I was back on the street again.

"So I slept in a flop house and let myself get to look like hell. Then I went after a hundred-thousand-a-year job. But I went at it obliquely. Looking like a bum, I pretended not to want the job for itself so much as for a chance of marrying the boss' daughter. According to all the rules, the boss ought to have had me thrown out as a nut. But he practically forced the job on me, though I all but refused it. Or should I say because I all but refused it? I still don't know just what he expected me to do — something in the advertising business, which I don't know a damn thing about.

"Then, without paying a cent, I rapidly acquired a huge apartment, a staff of servants, and a beautiful car. I didn't want them particularly — at least, that was the way I acted. If I'd wanted them desperately, you know what chance I'd have had of getting them. To show how little I cared for them, I finally abandoned them and hocked my new clothes to pay for the ad, though I could just as easily have kept back more than seventy-six cents.

"All of which shows that if you want something badly enough, you may get it. But it won't make you happy. It may take your whole lifetime — in fact, it usually does, just so it'll arrive when you can't enjoy it or when it'll seriously embarrass you."

Johnson was still looking apprehensively at the bulging pockets in which Hale kept his hands. "I'm sure that's very interesting. I don't see —"

"Oh, yes, you do. The Founding Fathers were a lot more practical than the medieval wizards. What does the Declaration of Independence say? ` — inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.' They knew better than to give the right to happiness, because they knew that only the pursuit is possible.

"But the ancient Greeks were the ones who had really studied life. Instead of a lot of childish brimstone, bats, and eternal coal shoveling, they pictured Hell as a place of psychological torment.

"There's Sisyphus, eternally pushing his boulder up a hill. Every so often he tires, and the boulder rolls down to the bottom, and he has to start over. There is no summit to the hill, but Sisyphus doesn't know that. Nor has he thought about what it'll be like if he does get to the nonexistent top. In real life some rare Sisyphus does sometimes perch his boulder on the peak of some hill. Then he either realizes what a stupid waste of effort it was, or, worse, he sees other, bigger hills with even more magnificent boulders to roll up them. Those, he thinks, will be success at last."

"Yeah!"

"Then there's Tantalus, starving and dying of thirst, up to his neck in a pool of cool, clean water, with a gorgeous cluster of fruit just in reach. He bends over to drink, and the water recedes. He reaches for the fruit, and the bough sways just far enough away to keep it out of reach. Sometimes he actually touches it; that keeps him trying. At last, when he's close enough to death, he succeeds!

"The fruit, of course, is dry, tasteless pulp."

Johnson fidgeted silently with a stack of paper for a minute. "How does that concern me?"

"Well, you can see the analogies. All of us suffer like Sisyphus and Tantalus, either in the realization of the meaninglessness of success, or in not attaining it. In short, the earth we're living on is Hell. We don't have to die; we're already there. I don't know what we're paying for, nor where we committed the remarkable sins that seem to require such vicious punishment.

"All I know is that if this is Hell, it's a damnably efficient one. From the time we're born until we die, we suffer unbearable tortures — physical, mental, and spiritual; but most of all fiendishly ingenious psychological tortures. For instance, when we're young we have health and strength and sharp senses. But we haven't the knowledge to use them properly. By the time we've learned to make something of them, we're getting old and losing them, and we know that our knowledge comes too late. Too late — and we know there's no going back; that we'll just get older and feebler until we die. Yet we cling to life.

"That's the greatest psychological torture of all; the instinct of self-preservation, the urge to live at all costs, no matter how much we've suffered or how much we'll continue to suffer as long as we live."

Johnson shook his head. "There's always hope," he said piously.

"Right! You saw to that. First a blind young hope. A few failures blunt that quickly enough, don't they? Then that eager hopefulness becomes a cowed, hopeless hope that maybe things will turn out all right after all. If they don't — there's always hope. If success comes and turns out futile and tasteless, there's always hope that it'll be better next time. So we keep on trying and inviting more disappointments.

"There was the oil magnate who hoped to live to a hundred — and died just short of it. There was the aluminum magnate who quit business at seventy, dashed off his memoirs quickly before he died — and then sat on his porch every day for twenty years, waiting for the death he hoped for. Pleasant, isn't it? A fit invention of Lucifer."

"I still don't see how that concerns me."

"Don't you? A Hell as efficient as this needs an organizing genius. It could never run so well without a manager."

Johnson returned Hale's thin smile with a troubled exposure of obviously false teeth. "And you think I'm the — manager, eh?"

"I don't think so. I know you're Lucifer!"

Johnson relapsed into apprehensive silence.

"You don't deny it, do you?" Hale accused.

Johnson strangled in an agony of indecision. "I would if you weren't insane! Of ... of course I deny it!"

"I came prepared for that," said Hale quietly. He stood up slowly and took out the gun. Johnson looked incredulous, jumped up, and tried to disappear behind the desk. The chair was jammed against the wall. There wasn't space.

"Don't! Don't! Please —"

He couldn't get his head down. It was impossible to miss. Hale took careful aim at the white, bobbing head. If the scrupulously cleaned and oiled mechanism hadn't jammed, he'd have blown that head right off.

Hale grinned and threw the gun away. "I was prepared for that, too. Now, just to make sure it wasn't an accident —" He took out the hunting knife. He wasn't even slightly nervous as he leaned over the desk, behind which Johnson was shrieking. Holding the sheath in his left hand, he tried to draw the blade with his right. At least a dozen vulnerable points were exposed.

— if the knife hadn't stuck in its sheath.

Just to be certain, Hale yanked again, with all his strength. He didn't expect it to come out. It didn't. Still grinning, he tossed the knife on the floor.

"There," he said. "That's my proof. That gun has never jammed before. It couldn't. With the safety catch off, you could practically shoot it by blowing on the trigger. And who ever heard of a knife sticking in a clean sheath a couple of sizes too big?"

Alexander P. Johnson straightened up. The puffs of white flesh crinkled into a genial network. "I admit it," he said in his hearty businessman's voice. "I'm Lucifer. What's your game, young fellow?"

"That's pretty obvious. I want to go into partnership with you."