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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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The Spider, January 1940, with "The Axeman's Necklace"
The mysterious axeman came to America to
accomplish the one kind deed which might help to balance the
horror he had spread in a country ruled by the Devil. But his own
brand of death overtook him—leaving Doc Turner to carry the
blood-red torch!
FROM behind the sales counter at the rear of his ancient pharmacy, Andrew Turner watched a tall man open the door to the street, hold it open as if hesitating whether to enter or not. The hurly-burly of a Morris Street Saturday night roared in; raucous cries of pushcart peddlers, the gabble of housewives chattering in a half-dozen tongues, the racketing thunder of an "El" train on the trestle that roofed this slum thoroughfare.
A tiny muscle twitched in the white-haired pharmacist's cheek.
The man was intent upon the scene outside, as reflected in the door's plate-glass panel. His raw-boned countenance was taut with terror.
A long sigh quivered through the drugstore's dingy dimness. The man closed the door and started back towards Doc, between the ponderous-framed showcases that once had been painted white. He was half-stumbling as though he were very tired. Or as though fear had robbed his huge body of its strength.
On the bare boards of a floor rutted by uncounted feet, his shoes made heavy, clumping sounds. They were thick-soled shoes, oddly shaped. His black ulster, buttoned to the neck, was too long, too wide-skirted, to have been styled in this country. His felt hat was black, wide-brimmed, high-crowned. What hair showed beneath its edge was gray, but the eyebrows and lashes were blonde, and the face, square in outline, did not belong to a man past his late thirties.
The eyes, blue-irised and bloodshot, were those of one who has seen too much, endured too long. They were the eyes of one who is driven by some personal devil to a doom he sees but cannot escape.
"Good evening," Doc said. His own eyes, themselves blue but faded by his long years, were expressionless. His right hand, long-fingered and sensitive, a dark net of swollen veins showing through its almost transparent skin, tugged at his bushy white mustache. Frail, a little stooped, he was dwarfed by the giant who had reached the other side of the sales counter and leaned against it for support.
"Good evening. I—I am Kurt Boehn." The intonation was precise, cultured, but unmistakably foreign. "Kurt Heinrich Boehn." The man repeated the name with a curious emphasis, as though he expected it to be recognized; as though he expected it to evoke some definite, familiar reaction. It meant nothing to the druggist.
"Yes, Mr. Boehn. And what can I do for you?"
"I am informed that you are acquainted with all who live in this district." Near the left corner of his thin mouth was a purplish birthmark about the size of a rice grain, roughly heart-shaped. "It is so?"
"Yes," Doc admitted. "I know pretty well everybody within blocks." This sort of questioning was nothing new to him. Enormous as is the city, those who come to it from across the sea seem instinctively to be drawn to the neighborhoods where their countrymen have gathered; to know that there they will find the friends and relatives who have preceded them. Friend, as he was, to the aliens of Morris Street longer than was comfortable to recall, it was a matter of course that such seekers be directed to Andrew Turner. "You are looking for someone?"
"A maiden. Her name is Rose Levy."
The old druggist peered sharply up into the face of his questioner. Levy. And the tall man was Nordic beyond any doubt; Aryan. "I know a number of families called Levy," Doc said, noncommittally. "Many of them have daughters called Rose."
"The one I seek has no family. Her mother's name was Leah, but now she is alone in the world. She is seventeen, and her eyes are the soft black of the midnight sky. She was a child of ten, unformed, when I saw her last. Now she must be slender like the stem of the flower for which she is called, and more graceful."
A strange way for a hunter to speak of his quarry. And yet... "Why are you looking for her?" Turner asked. "What do you want of her?"
"I have come a weary way to give her—" The tall man checked as the hinges of the store door creaked behind him. "You are sure this will be good for my pain?" He had swiftly plucked a bottle of liniment from the pyramid to Doc's left. "I cannot afford to spend money on nonsense." He glanced over his shoulder at the two men who had entered. When he looked at Turner again, the ruddiness that had lain under his skin had gone, leaving it ashen. "Can I trust you?"
"You can trust me," the pharmacist answered without the flicker of an eyelid. "I promise you that this will do what you ask." The shorter of the newcomers started leafing over the pages of a telephone book on the stand near the door. The other turned and stood looking out into the street. "It's well worth fifty cents." Both were heavily built. The backs of their thick necks were shaven, bluish.
"I depend on you," Boehn said, passing the bottle to Doc—his other hand in the same instant throwing something across the counter.
Turner wrapped the liniment while there ensued a strange, waiting silence upon which the tumult of Morris Street made no impression. Boehn exchanged a half-dollar for the package, turned and started out. He wasn't stumbling now as he went across the floor, straight to the door.
The man at the phone book looked around. "Ach!" he exclaimed, gutturally. "Das ist...!" His fingers caught hold of Boehn's arm. "Otto! Look who is here. Kurt himself."
Otto wheeled around. "Wunderbar!" The look of triumph in his thin-faced, narrow-lidded visage was masked at once. "We were chust phoning for you, Kurt. From der Verein is a special meeting called." He took Boehn's other arm in what was intended to be a friendly manner, but the ulster's fabric crushed under a powerful grip. "We are late."
Doc snatched up a quart bottle of ammonia, started around the end of the sales counter. "Let us hurry, then," Boehn said. "I do not want our friends to wait." He seemed eager!
The druggist halted, shrugged. The three strangers went out of the store. Marched, rather. They'd fallen into step—left, right, left, right—obviously through long habit. The door closed behind them, but Doc could still see them, marching straight through the shifting crowds on the sidewalk, marching between two pushcarts at the curb. They broke formation only when they reached a waiting sedan. The one called Otto sat in front, while the shorter man held the rear door open for Boehn.
A woman stopped short on the sidewalk. She stared at Boehn, and her mouth gaped open as if with stunned surprise. The sedan's doors slammed closed and it surged away, but the woman remained stock-still. Her box-shouldered, shabby coat, the flower-trimmed small hat perched on her flaxen hair, were as foreign as Boehn's garb.
Doc reached his store door, flung it open. "Frau Koenig," he called. "Please. I want to ask you something."
She came around to him. "Ja, Herr Turner? What is?"
"That man. The tall one with the black hat who just got into that car. You recognized him. Who is he?"
The color that had returned to Gretchen Koenig's wan cheeks in the year since she'd come to Morris Street was now gone. She licked gray lips, answered in a husky, unnatural voice. "Kurt Boehn."
"I know his name. I want to know what he is."
"I know not what he is now. What for he is here. But in the old country, in the city where I come from, he was an official. Just before I left, he disappeared. There was hope that he had received that which he gave to so many, but I see it is not so."
"What he gave to so many?" Doc insisted. "What was that?"
The woman made a small motion with her work-worn hand, as if to brush away some dreadful memory. "Death, Herr Turner. For those whom They call traitors to the State, but whom we others knew as patriots who work to bring back reason to a nation once well-beloved of all the world, Kurt Boehn was the Axeman..."
DOC TURNER thanked her, turned back into his drugstore. His
old hands rubbed one over the other, as though he were washing
them of the problem of the tall man in the black ulster, and the
two who had taken him away. It was, in fact, a problem no longer.
Two factions had come into conflict. Boehn had sided with the one
that had been defeated, had fled the usual "purge" of the
winners, and agents of the latter had followed him across the
sea. He was not one of the friendless poor on whose behalf the
old man often had risked death and would gladly do so again.
Kurt Boehn's troubles were no concern of his.
Recalling that he had laid Boehn's half-dollar on the ledge of the cash register, Doc went around behind the sales counter to ring up the sale. He kicked something that lay on the floor, an oblong package wrapped in brown paper. Tied with thin, but strong, black cord, it was about the size and shape of a half-pound, one-layer candy box, but when the old man picked it up he knew that it didn't weigh anywhere near a half-pound.
"Can I trust you?" Boehn had asked, and Doc had answered. "You can trust me." Then the black-ulstered man had said, "I depend on you," and thrown this back of the counter. What had he asked Doc to do with it? To keep it for him till he could return to claim it? Perhaps. That depended on whether Boehn, seeing those two shaven-necked fellows come into the store, expected ever to return.
Whatever it was, Doc had given his promise to do it, and he was bound by that promise unless and until he could tell Kurt Boehn that he withdrew it.
The old druggist rang up the half-dollar and went through a curtained door in the partition behind the sales counter into the narrow, shelf-walled prescription room. Holding the package in his gnarled, acid-stained fingers, he examined it more closely. The paper with which it was wrapped was of an unfamiliar texture, the cord knotted intricately. Bits of lint stuck to both, flakes of tobacco, as if the box had been carried in a pocket for a long time.
Doc shrugged, put the package in a drawer under the long, white-scrubbed dispensing counter, started laying out blue and white papers preparatory to making up a batch of Seidlitz powders.
The old man busied himself with the numberless chores of his profession, waited on his desultory trade. The crowds on the sidewalk outside began to thin, the hucksters to tack tarpaulins over what was left of their stocks. A tower-clock, somewhere, bonged eleven as Andrew Turner watched the shawled, broken-shoed purchaser of a nickel's worth of Castor Oil shamble out into the street. The door was caught from the woman's hand by a chunkily-built, carrot-headed youth in the dungarees of a garage mechanic. The young man pounded into the store, and his broad, freckle-dusted face was greenish under its smearing of grease, his lips tight-pressed.
He came around the end of the sales counter, went on through the doorway into the back room. Turner hurried after him, was just in time to see him being sick into the sink.
"Here, Jack," the old man said when he was through, holding out a glass with an amber liquid in it. "Wash your mouth and then drink this down."
Jack Ransom complied. "That's better," he smiled wanly, and looked at the emptied glass. "Gee, Doc. You've been holding out on me. That's the smoothest rye I've ever tasted. How come I didn't know you had it?"
Turner smiled back. "Sometimes whiskey's good medicine, son; you never needed it before." His tone was warm with affection. Far apart in years as they were, Jack and he had fought shoulder to shoulder in numberless forays against crooks who had attempted to prey on the people of Morris Street. "What's up? Eat something you wish you hadn't?"
"No." The youth pulled the edge of a big hand across his eyes. "Saw something I wish I hadn't." He shuddered. "Got a call to fix a flat, down near the river. Walking back, there was a cop in an alley between two warehouses, spotting something with his flashlight. I went in to look, like the nosenheimer I am. It was a man's corpse. Only the trunk, Doc. The head had been chopped off, clean, and the blood—" He gulped, his pupils dilating with horror.
"The man wore a black ulster," Doc said. "Very foreign in cut. His shoes were foreign-looking, too."
"How—" Jack stared. "How did you know?"
"When you said the corpse had been beheaded, it had to be his. They couldn't take him home through the blockade, to be executed as a traitor, so they did it here the same way."
"What the hell are you talking about?" The young man grabbed Doc's shoulder. "Come on. Spill it!"
TURNER related the strange incident of the early evening.
"Boehn knew he was going to his death," he ended. "I think he was
glad to go. But that means he knew he wasn't coming back for the
package."
"He wanted you to deliver it to this girl he was looking for, of course. That seems obvious."
"Yes. To a girl named Rose Levy. All I know about her is that she's about seventeen and an orphan, and that her mother's name was Leah."
"Maybe," Jack suggested, "there's something in the box that will tell us more. Where is it?"
"In that drawer," Doc pointed. The youth got it out, started to pluck at the knot. "Wait!" the old man snapped. "Let me do that. You're still in a cold sweat over what you saw down by the river. I don't want you repeating that little performance of yours."
Ransom looked at him, puzzled. "What do you mean?"
The druggist shrugged. "Only that what's in there may not be very pleasant. If you've read 'Reaching for Stars,' or any of the other books about those people, you'll remember they have a nice little habit of sending arrested persons back to their friends in boxes something like that one."
"In boxes? But how—"
"Their ashes, Jack," Doc explained, his eyes bleak, "and a card giving the victim's name and the date of his death."
"Hell!" the carrot-head grunted. "I'm no sissy." But he looked unhappy as he loosened the knot, unwrapped the brown paper, took the lid off the cheap cardboard box. "Ugh!" he exclaimed, his voice choked. "There—there is something here—not a card. A newspaper clipping."
The yellowed slip of pulp paper lay on a bed of cotton wool. It was printed in German. "I think I can translate it," Doc said, peering at it without touching it. "Hmm... Yes—'We are pleased to report that another traitoress has met her just fate under the redoubtable axe of our famed Kurt Boehn. The honor was too great for one of her race, but it was the judgment of the leaders of our destiny that she be accorded it as a public warning to other rats who nibble at the foundations of our State. We mention her name only that it may be reviled by all honest citizens. It is—Leah Levy!'"
"Nice fellow," Jack murmured, little lights crawling in the depths of his brown eyes. "He isn't satisfied with beheading the girl's mother. He travels all the way over here to give her—"
"Just a minute," Doc interrupted. "That doesn't quite make sense. I wonder if—" His fingers closed on the layer of cotton batting, lifted it.
"God!" Jack Ransom gasped.
Round, perfect globules lay on the lower layer of cotton, pink and glowing. Crystallized foam of the sea, spindrift of dreams... Pearls, perfectly matched in shade and sheen, filled the box. Straightened, they would make a necklace graduating each way from a central sphere the size of a Malaga grape.
ALMOST reverently Andrew Turner dropped the top layer of
cotton over them, laid the clipping on top of that. Not until
he'd replaced the box cover, re-wrapped and re-tied the package,
did he speak.
"For a girl named Rose," he sighed. "'Slender as the stem of the flower for which she is named, and as graceful.' With the smell of blood in Kurt Boehn's nostrils was mingled the perfume of a rose, and that was why the tortures of hell showed in his eyes."
"We've got to find her," Jack whispered. "We've got to get these to her. But how?"
"I have an idea," Doc said, putting the precious box back in the drawer from which it had been taken. "Boehn and the woman who told me what he was came from the same city. It is very likely that the girl also came from there, and that Gretchen Koenig will know her."
"Let's go!" the carrot-head blurted. "What are we waiting for?"
"For you to wash that grease off your face, for one thing," Doc said. "And for me to lock up."
"You'd better lock up damned good tonight," Jack grunted. "I'm no judge, but I'll bet my last cent that necklace is worth a hundred grand."
Minutes later there was only a single night-light burning in Turner's drugstore. Doc double-locked the door, turned to Jack. "All right, son."
"Gee, Doc," Ransom exclaimed. "I just thought—I ought to let the boss know I'm not going to be around for a couple hours. Do you mind stopping at the garage around the corner?"
"Of course not. A few minutes more won't do any harm." But the old man was mistaken, for there was a derby-hatted detective waiting at the garage.
"So you're Ransom," the dick grunted when the youth was pointed out to him. "You're wanted over at the house."
Jack stared at him. "What the hell for?"
"To tell what you know about a certain stiff without a head, seeing as how you showed up so nice an' pat right after it was found. The dumb flatfoot who let you beat it got a swell raking-over from the skipper."
"But I don't know anything," Jack protested. "I was just coming along—"
"Sure, sure. You can tell all that to the captain. All I got to do with it is orders to bring you in, an' that's what I'm goin' to do."
"But—"
"You'd better go, son," Turner said quietly. "There isn't any way out of it that I can see."
AND so Doc was alone when he climbed the dimly-lit, odorous
stairs of a tenement on Hogbund Lane and knocked at a door whose
paint peeled leprously from old wood.
He had to knock twice more before there was a whisper of approaching feet behind the scabrous panel and it started to open. Its inward swing stopped almost at once.
"Oh," the girl in the aperture gasped. "Ich habe gedacht—I thought it was Frau Koenig, her key forgotten." She was very young. The hair that hung in two braids beside her thin, dark face was black as midnight. Her clean, cotton kimono was caught around a form slender as the stem of a rose. "You—at this hour no stranger—" She was pushing the door closed.
Doc held it with his knee. "I am an old man," he said quickly. "You need not be afraid of me. It is you I want to see."
"Me?" She looked puzzled. "But—"
"You are Rose Levy, are you not? Your mother's name was Leah?"
"Mutter!" The door flew open and pitifully thin, white fingers had hold of Turner's wrist. "You—you bring word from her?"
"Perhaps. If she of whom I have word is really your mother."
"Come in." The girl almost dragged him into a room that turned out, when she turned up a pinpoint gas-jet, to be a kitchen, spotless, but furnished with pathetic meagerness. "I am Rose Levy, and my mother's name was Leah. What more do you want to know to make you sure?"
"Whether, for instance, you come from the same city as Frau Koenig."
"I was born there." Her excitement had quieted a little, but her black eyes were still eager. "That is how we come to be living together. But from Wien I came to this country, when no longer it was safe for those of my race to live even there."
"And your mother—she did not come with you?"
"When it became known we would have to flee again, we had no money. To get what we needed, she went back to—to where we'd come from, helped by the Secret—by certain ones who must be even here nameless. If she did not come back, she said, I was to go to the Quakers. They would help me. She—she did not come, and the gray-green hosts poured over the borders and so... so I went to the good Friends and came across the sea alone." A sob pulsed in her throat.
"And you've never heard from your mother again. But your father?"
A strange hardness came into the girl's face. "I have no father," she whispered. "The man—the man to whom my mother was married was an Aryan. When, in 1933, we were declared outcasts by the Law of Nuernberg, and any Aryan married to one of us proscribed unless he set his wife aside, that man denied my mother and me, to save his estates, his money. From that day I had no father."
"Ah," Doc replied, nodding. "That is why... You were wealthy before that?"
"It was long ago." Seven years would be long ago to her, Doc thought—it was half her life. "But I remember I had beautiful dresses, a pony, teachers for myself alone. That is why I speak your English so well. But are you not satisfied? My mother—what do you know of her?"
"I am satisfied." Doc moved closer, put out his hand to take Rose's cold one. "You must be brave."
"Brave!" the girl said bitterly. "After all I've gone through? Is she—does she live?"
From the way she asked it, from some sudden understanding, Doc abruptly was aware that the news he had for this girl was good news. "No," he said gently. "She's is dead. She died quickly, without suffering."
The girl flung her head back. "Grüss Gott!" she exclaimed. "Oh, thank You, God. Thank You that she is dead, and not..."
After a minute, Doc went on. "She died happy, my dear, for she had accomplished what she went for. She recovered that which will ensure your safety, your comfort, in this new, free land to which you have come. Someone brought it across the sea to you and left it with me—"
"Please," Rose interrupted. "I thank you, but I would like—to be alone just now. You will forgive me?"
"Of course." The old man went to the door, opened it. "Tomorrow morning, then, my dear, I will bring it to you." He closed the door, and as he turned to descend the stairs, his tired old eyes were misted with tears.
PERHAPS that was why he did not see the two shadowy figures on
the unlighted landing below, until they'd closed in on him, one
on each side, and a gruff voice was saying, "Which do you
wish—to go quiet with us, or to be killed?" He felt the gun
poked against his side much harder than necessary.
"I don't seem to have much choice," the old man responded, calmly. "Just where do you think you're taking me?"
"To your Apotheke—your drugstore. There is there what we have come a long way to get, and you will give it to us, tonight—not to that Jewess tomorrow morning like you have just said."
They came down into the light on the ground floor, and Doc saw that the one who spoke was the short man with the shaven neck who'd pretended to look at the telephone book, earlier that evening. The other man was the one called Otto.
The latter chuckled. "You should not talk so loud," he murmured. "Before we dealt with Kurt as we were sent to do, we made sure the necklace was not with him. He swore he had not given it to the maiden, but we did not believe him. We came to make sure he told the truth—just in time to hear you."
"I've got to do what you say," Doc murmured, "but if you don't mind, I'd rather do it without being made ill by your beastly voices. Oblige an old man by keeping quiet."
The sedan was waiting in front of the tenement. The streets of the slum were deserted at midnight. Once the car passed a policeman, but the pressure in Doc's side grew harder and he made no attempt to cry out. At last they got out in front of the drugstore on Morris Street, and he was fumbling his key into its lock.
He seemed to be having difficulty managing it. With an oath, Otto took the key from him, got the door open.
"If someone wants to know why we are here," he said, "you will tell him a doctor sent us to your home to bring you to make medicine for someone very sick."
The smells of the old pharmacy, of tansy and peppermint and colocynth; of old herbs and old medicaments, were nostalgic in the old druggist's nostrils. He led the way through the curtained aperture in the partition behind the sales counter, switched on the light in the back-room, turned to his captors.
"This is America," he said, "not your own lawless land. I'll give you what you came for, but you won't get away with it. All ships sailing are being carefully inspected, and within ten minutes after I give the alarm all exits from the city will be closed. You can't get away with this."
Otto leered down at the stub-nosed Luger automatic that was now frankly out in the open. "I do not think you will give any alarm. Your choice, my friend, is only how you will die. If you give us the package without trouble, you die quick. If not—" He shrugged.
"Enough," the short man, standing beside Otto, grunted. "Enough talk. Where is the necklace?"
"I hid it in here." Doc turned to the shelves that lined the back wall of the prescription room, reached up both hands to a square tin canister above his head, its green paint streaked with rust.
He lifted the canister—swept it backwards over his head and dropped to the ground under the cloud of red powder that spilled out of it. The Luger banged flatly, banged again. Agonized screams shrilled through the clatter of broken glass, and Doc was throwing himself against the wall, low-down, his eyes tight closed, his breath stopped. When he no longer felt the powder settling on his hands, he lifted, faced the shrieking forms that were pawing at streaming, blind eyes.
The old druggist grabbed a quart bottle, clubbed a head with it. The bottle shattered, and the form over which its contents poured slumped down. But Turner had snatched up another bottle, was leaping in to strike the skull of the remaining thug.
Two inert bodies sprawled on the red-dusted floor now, but the white-haired little pharmacist had sprung away from them again. He was at the sink, had turned on both faucets full force and was dashing water into his own face, into his reddened eyes.
OUTSIDE, the door smashed open and there was a sound of feet
running across the floor. "Doc!" Jack's shout came back to the
old man. "Doc!"
"All right, son," he said, blowing water. "I'm all right. But you'd better not go in there unless you want your eyes smarting with Capsicum—powdered red pepper. It's pretty nasty stuff, especially if you get a can full of it in your eyes."
"Cripes, Doc!" Jack panted heavily. "They just turned me loose at the police station, and I was hustling back here."
"Just a little too late," Turner advised, smiling wearily. "I knew you'd be along pretty soon, and I stalled as much as I could. But I couldn't stall long enough, so I had to take things in my own hands. Thing, I should say. That canister of Capsicum. I noticed last week that the hinges on its lid were rusted through, and I intended to have it fixed. Don't let anyone tell you, son, that procrastination is always bad."
"For cripes' sake, Doc!" Ransom blurted. "Quit your kidding—what happened?"
Doc told him. When he'd finished, Jack scratched his carroty head. "So you've got Boehn's killers stretched out in there waiting for the cops to come and get them, and the necklace is safe. But what I can't make out, Doc, is why should Boehn have brought the necklace over here to the girl when he knew he'd get himself in Dutch with his gang?"
"I'll tell you," Andrew Turner said. "Kurt Boehn, my boy, was a man who sold his soul to the devil and then tried to buy it back. Whether he did or not, I cannot know, but I do know that wherever he is now, he already has had his hell on earth."
The youth stared. "That sounds goofy to me."
Doc Turner smiled wearily. "Of course it does. Because I forgot to tell you one thing. Rose Levy, Jack, is a lovely girl and will be a beautiful woman, but there is one thing that will always mar her beauty. At the corner of her mouth, the left corner, is a little, purplish birthmark, no larger than a grain of rice, crudely heart-shaped. I noticed that same birthmark on Boehn's cheek, this evening."
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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