On an Odd Note

THE EYE

The generosity of the criminal generally consists in the giving away of something that never was, or no longer is, his own property. A case in point is that of the robber and murderer, Rurik Duncan, whose brief career was bloody, fierce and pitiless, but whose last empty gesture was thick and sticky with sentiment which uplifted the heart of a nation. Duncan gave away his eyes to be delivered after his death. It was regarded as a vital act of charity—in effect, a ticket to Salvation—that this singularly heartless fellow gave permission for his eyes to be grafted onto some person or persons unknown.

Similar cases have been printed in the newspapers. As it is with most philanthropists who give their all, so it was with this man Duncan. Having no further need for what he donated, he made a virtue of relinquishing it—stealing from his own grave, conning to the bitter end. I knew a billionaire whose ears were stopped during his lifetime against any plea for charity; but who, when his claws relaxed in death, gave what he had to orphans. I knew a Snow Maiden of an actress whose body is bequeathed to Science—whatever that may be. Rurik will rank with these, no doubt, on the Everlasting Plane. And why not? All the billionaire had that he was proud of was certain sums of money and holdings in perpetuity, which he let go because he had to. All the actress had was something of merely anatomical interest. Rurik had his eyes. He prized these eyes, which were of a strange, flecked, yellowish color. He could expand or contract them at will, and seemed to look in a different direction while he was watching your every movement.

Before we proceed with this old story, I had better make some kind of resumé of Rurik’s career. He was born between the rocks and the desert, and was what, in my day, was called a “nuisance,” but what is now termed a “juvenile delinquent.” In my day physical force used to be applied to such, whereafter they generally lived to die in their beds; now they bring in psychologists, and quite right, too, because you can never tell where anything begins or ends. It is only in extreme cases that a Rurik, nowadays, is stopped in his career with a tingling jolt and—first and last restraint—the pressure of certain heavy leather straps.

In brief: Rurik killed chickens, maimed sheep, corrupted and led a mob of fourteen-year-old muggers; graduated to the rackets in which he was employed to his pleasure and profit in nineteen states of the Union; got hot, gathered about him two coadjutors and became one of the most formidable operators since Dillinger. He had extraordinary luck, and a really remarkable sense of timing—without which no bank robber can hope to succeed. Also he had a highly developed administrative capacity, a strategic knack coupled with what one of the reporters called “tactical know-how.” He could time a getaway to that split second in which a traffic light winks, letting a town throw up its own road-block. Rurik went plundering from bank to bank. It has been argued that with such superb dissimulation and timing he might have been a great actor or, perhaps, a great boxer. He might have been a copper baron, or oil king, or a banker, if only he had been born in the right place and at the right time; or literate, an ink-slinger. But he wasn’t. He was born on an eroded farm, and went with a certain brilliance to his convulsive end.

Oddly enough, Rurik was not given to vindictiveness or hate, in the generally accepted sense of these terms. Something was missing from him that makes society possible. Call it a soul, call it a heart, call it pity; but say that he wanted to be alone. And so he was, right to the end, with a high-backed chair all to himself, and a secret which he thought he would carry on his own, looked within himself, to a narrow place where nobody could touch him.

This secret was the whereabouts of certain buried treasure; I mean the location of $2,600,000 which he had stolen and hidden nobody knew where.

It was Rurik who stole the armored truck in Butte, Montana. At any moment now the pulp-writers will rehash the Rurik snatch as a “perfect crime.” The details are available in the files of all the newspapers in the world. It is sufficient to say, here, simply that Rurik and his two companions, later to be known as “The Unholy Three,” exquisitely timing and balancing the operation, got away with an immense payroll, together with nearly all the money that had been in the vault of a great bank, one day, and seemed to evaporate, truck and all. Timing, timing, timing, said the Sunday supplement criminologists; until one became sick and tired of the word. There was also some reference to Mr. G.K. Chesterton’s “The Invisible Man,” whose cloak of invisibility was the fact that he was too familiar, at a given hour, to appear conspicuously out of place.

Both schools of thought were right: the timers and the psychologists. At one moment there was an armored truck loaded with money. Next moment there were three or four bewildered men, loosely holding pistols they did not know what to point at; three streets full of traffic had stopped for the lights, and a great fortune was on its way to nowhere. Only one shot was fired, and that by a bank guard named Larkin, a retired police officer who, when the three bandits appeared, one of them with a gun in his hand, let fly with a short-barreled .38. As it later transpired, Larkin hit Rurik in the hip and so precipitated his capture. When the money is recovered, it is believed, Larkin will have good legal grounds for claiming a reasonable portion of the reward. The robbers, by arrangement, carried unloaded automatics—it seems that Rurik was very particular about this. So, in about as long as it takes a man to say: “Was that a backfire?”—one of the greatest robberies of our time was perpetrated, and there was great federal perplexity. Anywhere in the world a man can disappear, as Willie Sutton did, simply by being patient and keeping still. In Montana, even an armored truck can disappear. But how does two and a half million-odd dollars disappear?

They found the truck a certain distance out of town, empty. Where, then, was the paper money and the silver? Any moving-man will tell you that there is nothing heavier than paper, and any bank messenger will tell you that there is nothing more unwieldy than a bag of loose coin. He would be a very strong man indeed who could carry on his back even a quarter of a million dollars in small bills for the distance of fifteen city blocks. Throw in a bag or two of silver dollars to joggle the equilibrium, and put soft sand underfoot instead of paving stones, and no man can do it. A mule couldn’t. And here not two hundred and fifty thousand, but two and a half million dollars had been spirited away to some hiding place in the rocks!

Reconstructing the affair, the federal authorities arrived at the conclusion that Rurik and his men stopped the truck somewhere on the outskirts of Butte and hid the money in some place tantalizingly close to town, known only to themselves. Each took $8,000 for current expenses. The truck was driven about fifteen miles further, to a point near where Rurik had hidden a getaway car. Rurik took this car, and then they separated, arranging to meet when it was expedient to do so. But this is what happened: Little Dominic, trying to buy a used car in Helena, was recognized and died fighting it out with the state troopers. MacGinnis lost his way northward among the rocks and died there, in his pig-headed way, rather than give himself up. Only Rurik was taken alive, having fainted through loss of blood in a filling-station.

It is worthy of note that before he lost consciousness, his last words were: “Even maps you can’t trust,” and afterward raved of the illusion of space and the fallacy of distance, until they brought him to. The State pumped into Rurik the solid blood and the plasma of I forget how many honest men before he was brought to trial and convicted of the bank robbery. Here the FBI furnished the additional information that, under another name, Rurik was wanted in the state of New York for murder. So he was shipped back to New York, neatly patched up, and there after fair trial, found guilty and sentenced to death by electrocution. He took the sentence impassively, his only comment being: “A short life and a merry one—” though, since most of his short life had been spent hiding or running away, I find it difficult to concur with his opinion of merriment.

Now while Rurik was playing pinochle in the death house, there came to him a certain Father Jellusik who said that Dr. Holliday, the eye surgeon, wanted Rurik’s eyes. The condemned man, laughing heartily, said: “Listen, Father, the D.A. offers me my life if I sing where the dough is stashed! And now somebody wants my eyes. No disrespect, Father, but don’t make me laugh. D’you think I never heard how you can see things in a dead man’s eye?”

Father Jellusik said, “My son, that’s an old wives’ tale. I have it on reliable authority that a dead man’s eye is no more revealing than an unloaded camera.”

Rurik began, “Once I looked into . . . well, anyway, I never saw nothing. What do they want my eyes for?”

“An eye,” said Father Jellusik, “is nothing but a certain arrangement of body tissue. Put it like this: you are you, Rurik. If one of your fingers were chopped off, would you still be Rurik?”

“Who else?”

“Without your arms and legs, who would you be?”

“Rurik.”

“Now say you had an expensive miniature camera, and were making your will. Wouldn’t you give it away?”

“To the cops, no.”

“But to an innocent child?”

“I guess I might.”

“And the eye, you know, is nothing but a camera.”

In the end Rurik signed a document bequeathing his eyes to Dr. Holliday, for the benefit of this remarkable surgeon’s child patients, many of whom had been born blind. “You can’t take ’em with you,” Rurik is alleged to have said; thereby letting loose a tidal wave of emotion. One would have thought that Rurik was the first person ever to utter this proposition. The sob sisters took him to their bosoms, and put into his mouth all kinds of scrapbook philosophy, such as: “If more folks thought more about more folks, the world—” et cetera, et cetera. His last words, which were: “Hold it, I changed my mind,” were reported as: “I feel kind of at peace now.” The general public completely ignored the fact that there was a little matter of two and a half million dollars which Rurik had, to all practical intents and purposes, taken with him.

The few that thought of the matter said: “They’ll track that money down. It’s got to be somewhere, and they’ll trace it. The FBI will throw out a net.” But in point of fact, Little Dominic and MacGinnis being dead, no one had a clue to its whereabouts. It was buried treasure.

For years previous to the execution of Rurik Duncan, Dr. Holliday had been performing fabulous feats of eye surgery. To him the grafting of corneal tissue from the eye of a man recently dead to the eye of a living child was a routine affair which he regarded much as a tailor regards the stitching of a collar—good sewing was essential, as a matter of course, but the thing had to fit. And, somewhat like certain fierce tailors of the old school, he was at once savagely possessive, devilishly proud and bitterly contemptuous of the craft to which he was married. I know an old tailor who never tired of sneering at himself, who would have nothing to do with his fellow craftsmen because they were, in his opinion, mere tailors; but who ordered King Edward VII to get out of his shop and stay out, because His Majesty questioned the hang of a sleeve. Dr. Holliday was a man of this character—dissatisfied, arbitrary, unsatisfying, ill-natured, impossible to please. He had something like a contemptuous familiarity with the marvelous mechanism of the human eye, but would allow nobody but himself to talk lightly of it. He became famous when he grafted his first cornea. When the reporters came to interview him he appeared to be angry with the world for admiring him.

Irritable, disdainful, his face set in a look of intense distaste, and talking in an overemphasized reedy voice, he could make the most casual remark offensive. Reminded of his services to humanity, Dr. Holliday said, “Human eyes, sheep’s eyes—they are all one to me. As eyes, a fly’s eyes are far more remarkable. Your eye is nothing but a makeshift arrangement for receiving light rays upon a sensitive surface. A camera with an automatic shutter, and damned inefficient at that. They do better in the factories. I have repaired a camera. Well?”

A reporter said, “But you’ve restored sight, Dr. Holliday. A camera can’t see without an eye behind it.”

Dr. Holliday snapped, “Neither can an eye see, as anybody but an absolute fool must know.”

“Well, you can’t see without your eyes,” another reporter said.

“You can’t see with them,” said Dr. Holliday. “Even if I had the time to explain to you the difference between looking and seeing, you have not the power to understand me; and even if you had, how would you convey what you understood to the louts who buy your journal? Let it be sufficient for me to say, therefore, that the grafting of a cornea, to one who knows how to do it, is probably less difficult than an invisible darning job done to hide a cigarette burn in your trousers. Vision comes from behind the eye.”

One of the reporters who wrote up things like viruses and astronomy for the Sunday supplement said: “Optic nerve—” at which Dr. Holliday swooped at him like a sparrow hawk.

“What do you know about the optic nerve, if I may ask? Oh, I love these popular scientists, I love them! Optic nerve. That’s all there is to it, isn’t it? A wiring job, so to speak, eh? Plug it in, switch it on, turn a knob—is that the idea? Splice it, like a rope, eh? My dear sir, you know nothing about the tiniest and most insignificant nerve in your body, let alone how it is motivated—and neither do I, and neither does anybody else. But you will suck on your scientific jargon, just as a weaning baby sucks on an unhygienic rubber pacifier. It is an impertinence, sir, to talk so glibly to me! ‘Optic nerve’—as if I were a chorus girl! Can you name me thirty parts, say, of the mere eye—just name them—that you talk with such facility of optic nerves? Have you considered the extraordinary complexity of the optic nerve? The microscopic complications of cellular tissues and blood vessels?”

The reporter, abashed, said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Holliday. I was only going to ask if it might be possible—I don’t mean in our time, but some time—really to graft a whole eye and, as you put it, splice an optic nerve?”

In his disagreeable way, unconsciously mocking the hesitancy of the reporter’s voice—this was another of his unpleasant mannerisms—Dr. Holliday said, “Yes sir, and no sir. One thing is impossible and that is to predict what may or may not be surgically possible or impossible in our time. But I can tell you this, sir, as expert to expert: it is about as possible to graft a whole eye as it might be to graft a whole head. As every schoolboy must know, nervous tissue does not regenerate itself in the vertebrate, except in the case of the salamander in whom the regenerative process remains a mystery.”

A lady reporter asked, “Aren’t salamanders those lizards that are supposed to live in fire, or something?”

Dr. Holliday started to snap but, meeting the wide gaze of this young woman, liked her irises and, gently for him, explained, “The salamander resembles a lizard but it is an amphibian, with a long tail. An amphibian lives both in and out of water. Have you never seen a salamander? I’ll show you one . . .” And he led the way to an air-conditioned room that smelled somewhat of dead vegetation, through which ran a miniature river bordered with mud. In this mud languid little animals stirred.

A man from the south said, “Heck, they’re mud-eels!”

At him Dr. Holliday curled a lip, saying, “Same thing.”

The Sunday supplement man said, “Dr. Holliday, may I ask whether you are studying the metabolic processes of the salamander with a view to their application—”

“No, you may not.”

The lady reporter said, “I think they’re cute. Where can I get one?”

Majestically, Dr. Holliday called to an assistant: “Everington, put a couple of salamanders in a jar for the lady!”

Next day there were photographs of a salamander in the papers, and headlines like this:

After that Dr. Holliday would not speak to anybody connected with the press and was dragged into the limelight again only when he grafted the right eye of Rurik into the head of a four-year-old boy named Dicky Aldous, son of Richard Aldous, a wealthy paint manufacturer of Greenwich, Connecticut.

It was not one operation, but eight, over a period of about six weeks, during which time the child’s eye was kept half-in and half-out of a certain fluid which Dr. Holliday has refused to discuss. The Sunday supplement writer, the “sensationalist,” has hinted that this stuff is derived from the lizard-like amphibian salamander which, alone among vertebrates, has the power to regenerate nervous tissue. It is not for me to express an opinion in this matter. Only I will insist that sensationalists all too often are right.

Jules Verne was a sensationalist; and now we are discussing man-powered rockets to the moon. H.G. Wells was a sensationalist; but there really are such things as heavier-than-air aircraft, automatic sights and atomic bombs. I, for one, refuse to discount the surmises of the Sunday supplement man who put it as a conjecture that Dr. Holliday was using, as a regenerative principle, some hormone extracted from the humble salamander. Why not? Alexander Fleming found penicillin in the mold on lemon rind. Believe me, if it were not for such cranks, medicine would still be witch-doctoring, and brain surgery a hole in the head to let the devils out.

Anyway, Dr. Holliday grafted Rurik Duncan’s right eye into the head of the four-year-old Dicky Aldous. It is not true that the father, Richard Aldous, paid Dr. Holliday a hundred thousand dollars for the operation; Mr. Aldous donated this sum, and more, to the Holliday Foundation, of which every schoolboy has heard.

To state the facts baldly: when the bandages were lifted, Dicky Aldous, born blind, could see out of his new right eye. The left remained sightless; but with the right the child could clearly discriminate objects. The lady reporter made quite a piece out of his first recognition of the color blue.

The Sunday supplement man, in whose bosom still rankled Dr. Holliday’s rudeness, wrote an article suggesting that the delicate tissues of the human eye might be seriously altered by the tremendous shock of electrocution which, since it involves the entire nervous system, necessarily affects the optic nerve.

Dr. Holliday, after a few outbursts, became silent. It was noted that he was frequently found to be in consultation with the English brain specialist, Mr. Donne, and Dr. Felsen, the neurologist. Paragraph by paragraph the case of Dicky Aldous dropped out of the papers.

It was simply taken for granted that it was possible to graft a living eye. Other matters came up to occupy our attention—Russia, the hydrogen bomb, Israel, the World Series—and the fly-trap of the public mind closed upon and digested what once it had gapingly received as “The Dicky Aldous Miracle.”

But this is far from being the end of the story. As an old friend of Richard Aldous and his family I was privileged to witness subsequent events. And since, now, it can do no harm and might do some good, I feel that I have the right to offer the public a brief account of these events.

Richard Aldous was a third-generation millionaire; genteel, sensitive, a collector of engravings. His wife, whom he had met in Lucca, was an Italian princess—finely engraved herself, and almost fanatically fastidious. Tourists used to wonder how it was possible for a sensitive, highbred Italian aristocrat to live in a palazzo surrounded with filth. Actually there is nothing to wonder at—the explanation is in the three wise monkeys, procurable at any novelty store. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil—and there you are, divorced from humanity. In extreme cases stop your nose, having previously sprinkled yourself with strong perfume.

As you can imagine, therefore, little Dicky Aldous in his fifth year was a child who was being brought up by his mother in complete ignorance of the ugliness that exists in the world. The servants in the Aldous house had been selected rather than simply employed—examined, as it were, through a magnifying glass—generally imported from Europe, expense being no object. Dicky’s nurse was a sweet-natured English gentlewoman. From her he could have heard nothing but old-fashioned nursery songs—sung off-key, perhaps, but kindly and innocuous—and no story more dangerous than the one about the pig that wouldn’t jump over the stile. The housekeeper was from Lucca; she had followed her mistress six years previous, with her husband, the butler. Neither of them could speak more than two or three phrases in English. Mrs. Aldous’s maid, Beatrice, also was an Italian girl, a wonderful needlewoman and hairdresser but totally ignorant of the English language. Indeed, she seldom spoke any language at all—she preferred to sing, which the little boy liked, being blind.

Here were no evil communications to corrupt the good manners of poor Dicky Aldous.

Yet one day, about a month after the sensational success of Dr. Holliday’s operation had been fully established, the English nurse came down from the nursery to make the required announcement that Master Dicky was asleep, and there was something in her manner which made the father ask, “Anything wrong, Miss Williams?”

Rachel Williams, the English nanny, didn’t like to say, but at last she burst out—that somebody must have been teaching little Dicky to use bad language. She could not imagine who might be responsible. Closely pressed, she spelled out a word or two—she could not defile her tongue by uttering them whole—and Aldous began to laugh. “Tell me now, Miss Williams, what is the name of Mrs. Aldous’s maid?”

“Beatrice,” said Miss Williams, pronouncing the name in the Italian style.

“And what’s the diminutive? How does Mrs. Aldous generally address her?”

“Bici,” said the nurse.

“When Dicky first saw the light, bless his heart, where did you tell him it came from?”

“Why, Mr. Aldous, from the sun.”

“Work it out, Miss Williams, and I think you’ll arrive at the origins of most of this so-called ‘bad’ language.”

All the same, when the nurse was at supper, Mr. Aldous went to the nursery where his son lay sleeping. On the way into the room he met his wife hurrying out, evidently on the verge of tears. She said, “Oh Richard, our boy is possessed by a devil! He just said, in his sleep, ‘For crying out roud, cease, you rousy sandwich!’ Where did he ever hear a word like ‘cease’?”

Her husband sent her to bed, saying, “Why, darling, little Dicky has had to suffer the impact of too many new sensations, too suddenly. The shock must be something like the shock of being born. Rest, sweetheart.” Then he went into the nursery and sat by the child’s crib.

After a little while, stirring uneasily in his sleep, speaking in the accents of the gutters of the West, Dicky Aldous said quite clearly, “Ah, shup! Aina kina guya rat!”—distinguishable to his father as: ‘Ah, shut up! I ain’t the kind of guy to rat!’

Then, tossing feverishly from side to side and talking through his milk teeth, his face curiously distorted so that he spoke almost without moving his lips, Dicky Aldous said, in baby talk with which I will not trouble your eyes or distract your attention by writing it phonetically: “. . . Listen, and get it right, this time, you son-of-a . . .” He added a string of expletives which, coming from him, were indescribably shocking. Perhaps horrifying is the better word because you can understand shock, being aware of its cause; but horror makes no sense. That is why it is horrible—there lies the quintessence of nightmare, in the truth divorced from reason.

Typically, the first thing Richard Aldous thought of was Henry James and “The Turn of the Screw.” How could this innocent child be saying words he could not possibly have heard in his tiny life? Now Mr. Aldous began to suspect the doctors, who are notoriously loose of language off the record among themselves. But presently, in a tense whisper, while the entire face of the child seemed to age and alter, Dicky said, “Dom, you take the big .45; Mac, take the cut-down, snub-nose, blue-barrel .38. What for? Because I’m telling you. A big gun looks five times bigger on a runt like Little Dominic. Get me? And a blue belly-gun looks twice as dangerous in the mitt of a big lug like Mac. Me, I take the Luger, because one look at a Luger, you know it’s made for business. . . . But empty, I want ’em empty. . . . C’mon, let’s have a look at that magazine, Dom. . . . Mac, break me them barrels. . . . Good! . . . You got an argument, Dom? Okay, so have I. I ain’t got no ambition to graduate to be Number One, and in Montana, brother, they hang you up. . . . Okay, okay, call it unscientific, but you’ll do as I say; because, believe me, this job’ll be pulled using those things just for show. My weapon is time. Cease, Dominic. . . . Gimme a feel of that .45. Empty. Good, let it stay like that. . . . Okay, then, I want this straight, I want this right from the start. We’ll go over this again. . . .”

Then Dicky Aldous stopped talking. His face reassumed its proper contours, and he slept peacefully.

Mr. Aldous met Miss Williams on the stairs. “It’s worrying me to death,” she said. “I cannot for the life of me imagine where Dicky-darling picked up the word ‘cease.’ ”

Mr. Aldous said, “I think, just for a few nights, Miss Williams, I’ll sleep in his room.”

And so Mr. Aldous did. To be accurate, he lay down on the nurse’s bed, and stayed awake, listening. He made careful notes of what poor Dicky said in his sleep—and many of the things the child said were concerned with visual memory, which the boy could not have had, since he was born blind.

“. . . They’s a whole knot o’ cottonmouths on the island past Miller’s Bend. What’ll you give me if I show you? What, you never seen a cottonmouth? Give me something and I’ll show you. It’s a snake, see, a great big poison snake, and it’s got a mouth like it’s full of cotton, and poison teeth longer’n your finger. C’mon, give me what you got and I’ll show you the cottonmouths,” Dicky said, his voice growing uglier. “. . . What d’you mean, you ain’t got nothing? You been wasting my time? Ever learn the Indian twist, so you can break a growed man’s elbow? All right, boy, I’ll show you for free. . . . Oh, that hurts, does it? Too bad. A bit more pressure and it’ll hurt you for keeps—like that. . . . You still ain’t got nothing to see the cottonmouths all tangled in a knot? . . . Oh, you’ll get it, will you? You’d better. And you owe me an extra dime for learning you the Indian twist. . . . No sir, just for wasting my time I ain’t going to show you them cottonmouths today—not till you bring me twenty cents, you punk, you. And then maybe I’ll show you that nest o’ diamond back rattlesnakes at Geranium Creek. But if you don’t deliver, Malachi Westbrook—mind me now—I’ll show you the Seminole jaw-grip. That takes a man’s head clear off. And I’ll show it to you good, Malachi. Yes sir, me and Teddy Pinchbeck will sure show you good! Mind me, now; meet me and Teddy Pinchbeck at the old Washington boathouse eight o’clock tomorrow morning, and bring Charley Greengrass with you. He better have twenty cents with him, too, or else. . . .”

Mr. Aldous wrote all this down. At about three o’clock in the morning Dicky said, “Okay, kids. You paid up. You’re okay. Okay, I’ll just borrow Three-Finger Mike’s little old boat, and Teddy Pinchbeck and me’ll take you and Charley Greengrass to look at them cottonmouths. Only see here, you kids, me and Teddy Pinchbeck got to pole you way past Burnt Swamp, and all the way to Miller’s Bend. That’ll cost ’em, won’t it, Teddy? . . . You ain’t got it? Get it. And stop crying—it makes me nervous, don’t it, Teddy? And when I’m nervous I’m liable to show you the Indian hip-grip, so you’ll never walk again as long as you live. You mind me now! . . .”

Dicky said no more that night. At about nine o’clock in the morning Mr. Aldous made an appointment with a psychologist, one Dr. Asher who, finding himself caught on the horns of this dilemma—carte blanche and an insoluble problem—double-talked himself into one of those psychiatric serials that are longer than human patience. But what was Dr. Asher to say? Little Dicky Aldous had no vision to remember with; there was nothing in his head upon which juvenile imagination might conceivably fall back.

It was by sheer accident that Mr. Aldous met a lieutenant of detectives named Neetsfoot to whom he confided the matter, hoping against hope, simply because Neetsfoot had worked on the Rurik Duncan case.

The detective said, “That’s very strange, Mr. Aldous. Let’s have it all over again.”

“I have it written down verbatim, Lieutenant.”

“I’d be grateful if you’d let me make a copy, Mr. Aldous. And look—I have children of my own. My boy has had polio, in fact, and I’ve kind of got the habit of talking to kids without upsetting them. Would you have any objection—this is unofficial—would you have any objection to my talking to your son a little bit?”

“What in the world for?” asked Mr. Aldous.

Lieutenant Neetsfoot said, “Mr. Aldous, if you haven’t got a clue to something, well, that’s that. In that case, if you see what I mean, it doesn’t even come within range of being understood. At a certain point you stop trying to understand it. Now sometimes something that makes absolutely no sense at all, flapping about in the dark, throws a switch. And there you’ve got a mystery.”

“I don’t get what you’re driving at, Lieutenant.”

“Neither do I, Mr. Aldous. But I’ll give you the leading points, if you like. A—I know all there is to know about Rurik Duncan; saw him electrocuted, in fact. And a miserable show he made of it. B—I don’t like to dig these matters up, but your son, five years old and born blind, had one of Rurik’s eyes grafted into his head by Dr. Holliday. And now, C—the child is going word for word and point by point into details of things that happened about sixteen years before he was born and two thousand miles away!”

“Oh no, surely not!” cried Mr. Aldous.

“Oh yes, surely so,” said the Lieutenant. “And geographically accurate, at that. What’s more remarkable, your son has got the names right of people that were never heard of and who died before he was born. What d’you make of that? Teddy Pinchbeck was shot in a fight outside a church it must be ten, eleven years ago. A bad boy, that one. And where did I get my information? From Malachi Westbrook—he’s a realtor, now. There was an old Washington boathouse, and Malachi Westbrook’s the man that tore it down to make space for Westbrook Landing. Charley Greengrass runs his late father’s store. There was a Three-Finger Mike, but he just disappeared. There really is a Cottonmouth Island just past a Miller’s Bend, and in the mating season it’s one writhing mass. And Rurik Duncan did break Malachi Westbrook’s arm, before your son was born. Well?”

“This I do not understand,” said Richard Aldous.

“Me neither. Mind if I sit with the boy a bit?”

“No, Lieutenant, no . . . but how on earth could he know about cottonmouths? He never saw one. He never saw anything, poor child. To be frank with you, neither my wife nor I have ever seen a cottonmouth snake. I simply don’t get it.”

“Then you don’t mind?”

“Go ahead by all means, Lieutenant,” said Mr. Aldous.

Neetsfoot went ahead—in other words, he sacrificed two weeks of his vacation in a dead silence, listening by Dicky’s bed while the child slept. Mrs. Aldous was in the grip of a nervous breakdown, so that her husband was present only half the time. But he bears witness—and so, at a later date, does an official stenographer—to what Dicky Aldous said, in what was eventually termed his “delirium.”

First, the child struggled left and right. It appeared to the detective that he was somehow trying to writhe away from something; that he was in the clutch of a nightmare. His temperature went up to 103 degrees, and then he said, “Look. This is the setup, you kids. The Pan keeps the engine running. Get that right from the start, Pan. Little Joe sticks a toothpick under the bell-push. I put the heat on. Okay? Okay!”

Lieutenant Neetsfoot knew what to make of this. The man who was called The Pan on account of his rigid face was driver for several gangsters; Little Joe Ricardo was a sort of assistant gunman who was trying to make the grade with the big mobs. The heat, as Neetsfoot construed it, was put on a union leader named M’Turk, for whose murder Rurik Duncan was tried but acquitted for lack of evidence.

M’Turk was shot down in his own doorway; the street was aroused less by the noise of the shot than by the constant ringing of M’Turk’s doorbell, under which somebody had stuck a toothpick.

But all this had happened at least eight years before Dicky Aldous was born.

“. . . And this I don’t quite get,” said Lieutenant Neetsfoot.

“There is something distinctly peculiar here,” Mr. Aldous said. “But I won’t have the child bothered.”

“I’m not bothering the child, Mr. Aldous, the child’s bothering me. Heaven’s my judge, I haven’t opened my mouth. Not even to smoke! The kid does all the talking, and Gregory takes it down on the machine. You can believe me when I tell you, there’s something funny here. Your little boy has gone into details about the M’Turk shooting; and this I can’t understand. Tell me, Mr. Aldous, do you remember the details of M’Turk?”

“No, I can’t say I do, Lieutenant.”

“Then how does the kid?”

“I must have told your people a thousand times: my son couldn’t possibly have heard anything about the people or the events you keep harping on.”

“I know he couldn’t, Mr. Aldous. This is off the record and on my own time. That’s understood, isn’t it?”

“It is a most extraordinary situation, Lieutenant.”

“You can say that again.”

Mr. Aldous said, with a kind of detached enthusiasm that somehow disgusted the detective, “You know what? The eye of this man Rurik Duncan having been grafted, complete with optic nerve, it’s almost as if the child’s actually seeing through Rurik Duncan’s optic nerve!”

“Almost as if,” said the lieutenant.

“But how?”

“Ask the doctor, don’t ask me.”

And Dr. Holliday was, indeed, the fourth witness to the last, and most important, utterances of the boy into whose orbit he had grafted the right eye of Rurik Duncan. It happened, as previously, between two and three o’clock in the morning.

Dicky said, “Now listen. You, Dom, listen. And you listen, Mac. . . . You heard it before? Then hear it again. This is the way I want it, and this is the way it’s going to be. Dom, you always were trigger-happy. First, no loads in the rods. I want these guns ice-cold. One thing I won’t do, and that’s hang. And in Montana they hang you on a rope. Never forget that. . . . Second, follow my timing, and you can’t go wrong. We beat the lights. Remember, it’s two million and a half in small bills. Better men than you have died for less. My uncle Gabe died through getting bitten in the leg by a hog. This way’s more fun. . . . Third, the short haul in the armored truck, and the swift stash in the Rocks, you know where. Got it? Fourth, the quick scatter. Now somebody could get hurt. So let’s get this right. Okay? I’ll go over it again—”

At this point, Mr. Aldous, carried away by sheer excitement, cried, “Yes, but exactly where is the money? Where did we put it?”

Dicky sneered in his sleep, “And exactly where d’you get that ‘did’? It ain’t put there yet. . . . And who’s ‘we’? Little Dom and Mac I told already. There ain’t no more ‘we.’ Go burn me, mister, and sniff for it. . . . We, crysakes! Well, I guess you got to be dumb, or you wouldn’t be a cop. Okay. You want to know where the dough is? I’ll tell you. It’s in Montana. Got that wrote down? Montana. It’s going to be loaded in a great big armored track in Butte. And then where?—” The child laughed in a singularly ugly way. “It’ll be my pleasure to tell you, mister: somewhere in Montana. All you got to do when I stash this dough is, scratch. Okay, Mr. Dickins?”

“Wasn’t Dickins the name of the district attorney who offered Rurik Duncan his life if he would divulge the whereabouts of the stolen money?” whispered Mr. Aldous.

Lieutenant Neetsfoot replied, not without bitterness, “Yes, it was. For God’s sake, shut up—I think you’ve already talked us out of that two and a half million. And here I’ve sat like a stone for fifteen days, and right at the end you must bust in and open your damn yap.”

Deeply hurt, Mr. Aldous said, “My son has always responded to my voice.”

The lieutenant looked at him with disdain, and then said, in a carefully controlled voice, “Yes, Mr. Aldous. Your son has always responded to your voice, Mr. Aldous. But damn it, that wasn’t your son who was talking—that was Rurik Duncan! That was Rurik Duncan running over orders with Little Dominic and MacGinnis before the truck was snatched and the money stashed away! I told you to keep quiet like me, I begged you to keep your mouth shut like I did. But no, your son has always responded to your voice. Congratulations, Mr. Aldous; you’ve got the costliest voice in the world—it’s just talked us out of ten per cent of two million six hundred thousand dollars!”

They sat by the crib until dawn but, his fever past, Dicky Aldous, perspiring freely, talked no more in his sleep.

When he awoke, his father, who had an unshakable faith in the power of his voice to arouse response in his hitherto blind son, said, “Now, Dicky-darling, tell Daddy-dear about Montana.”

“Want to see blue,” said Dicky; and became engrossed in the color and the shape of a large red non-poisonous nylon teddy bear of which he had previously known only the texture.

And from that day to this he has not talked of Montana. His memory of events preceding Dr. Holliday’s operation is rapidly fading. Dr. Holliday, who visits the house from time to time, has put forward a half-hearted theory that, by some unexplained process, the regenerated nervous tissue, heavily charged with electricity, retained and conveyed the visual memory of Rurik Duncan only while this tissue was knitting. It may come back, he says, in adult life; or, on the other hand, it may not.

Lieutenant Neetsfoot, whom Mr. Aldous regards as a “character” pays a visit every other Sunday. He likes to play with the little boy. It was he who said to me, “This is unofficial, off the record; but I’m pretty observant. When I was a rookie I learned to watch you without seeming to. And I can tell you, there’s something very, very funny about that kid’s eye when he thinks he isn’t being observed. He’s seven now. I’m due to retire nine years from now. Call me crazy, but believe me—when that kid is old enough to have a car of his own and take a vacation without anybody else along, wherever he goes I’ll follow him.”

Here, for the time being, the matter rests.